THE AMERICAN CREDO 



BY H. L. MENCKEN AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 

HELIOCABALUS : A BUFFOONERY 



BY H. L. MENCKEN 



BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE 
NIETZSCHE 



a book of burlesques 
in defense of women 
a book of prefaces 
prejudices: first series 

SECOND •• 
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE 



mr. george jean nathan 
presents 

a book without a title 

the popular theatre 

COMEDIANS ALL 

THE THEATRE. THE DRAMA, 
THE GIRLS, 

THE CRITIC AND THE DRAMA 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

A Contribution Toward the Interpretation 
of the National Mind 

Revised and EnUtrged Edition 



BY 

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN 
and H. L. MENCKEN 




NEW YORK 

ALFRED • A • KNOPF 

1921 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 






3S xUlolo 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES Or AMERICA 



PREFACES 



PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND 
ENLARGED EDITION 

This edition embodies a number of changes, 
some of omission and some of addition. The im- 
perfections of the original work were obvious to 
us when we sent it forth, and we are very grateful 
to those scholars at home and abroad who have 
contributed so generously to its improvement. In 
particular, we owe a large debt to Mr. Aubrey 
Donaldson, M. A., Reader in Comparative Myth- 
ology at Oxford, and to Prof. Dr. Gustav Simmel- 
meyer, of the University of Zurich. Dr. Simmel- 
meyer printed a long and very learned review of 
the work in the Schweizerisches Archiv fur Volks- 
kunde, and it was instrumental in establishing 
pleasant contacts with distinguished folk-lorists in 
various European countries, notably Dr. Arnold 
Letkow of Berlin, Prof. Ledoux of the Sorbonne, 
Dr. Enrico Forelli of Turin, and Prof. Mendoza of 
Salamanca, editor of the well-known Bihlioteca de 
las tradiciones espanolas. Prof. Mendoza was 
good enough to say that the book showed a revolu- 

[3] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

tionary point of departure in the study of the ori- 
gin and growth of myths, and to propose that a 
series of volumes upon the same plan be under- 
taken by European savants, each dealing with his 
own country. This proposal has met with a re- 
sponse in Sweden, where Dr. Gothemann, lecturer 
upon Oral Literatures at Upsala, has undertaken 
a Swedish work of like character, and in Germany, 
where various articles dealing with German popu- 
lar beliefs in the same manner have been printed 
in the Beitrdge zur Volks- und Volkerkunde, 
chiefly from the able pens of Prof. Kuno Goertz 
and Baron Hereward von Albrechtsein. We are 
also informed that a Bulgarian ethnologist has 
undertaken a collection, and that a monograph 
upon Italian folk-history, by Prof. Forelli, is soon 
to be published in the Archivio per lo studio delle 
tradizioni populari of Palermo. 

From observers nearer home we have received 
a great deal of aid. In fact, it would fill several 
pages merely to print the names of those who have 
kindly favoured us with additions to our collection, 
and with criticisms of the matter already printed. 
In the case of the latter we have found it necessary 
to make few changes. The first edition was in- 

[4] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

complete, but we believe that, in the main, it was 
accurate. In conclusion we have to offer our 
thanks to the authorities of the Smithsonian Insti- 
tution and to various members of the American 
Folk-Lore Society and the American Anthropo- 
logical Association for important suggestions. 
Some of the material, of course, is in a state of flux; 
as the years pass popular beliefs change. We 
hope, at intervals, to revise the book, and we shall 
be grateful for contributions and criticisms. 

GJ.N. 
H.L.M. 
New York, January 1, 1922. 



[5] 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 



The superficial, no doubt, will mistake this little 
book for a somewhat laborious attempt at jocos- 
ity. Because, incidentally to its main purpose, it 
unveils occasional ideas of so inordinate an erron- 
eousness that they verge upon the ludicrous, it will 
be set down a piece of spoofing, and perhaps de- 
nounced as in bad taste. But all the while that 
main purpose will remain clear enough to the 
judicious. It is, in brief, the purpose of clarifying 
the current exchange of rhetorical gas-bombs upon 
the subject of American ideals and the American 
character, so copious, so cocksure and withal so 
ill-informed and inconclusive, by putting into plain 
propositions some of the notions that lie at the 
heart of those ideals and enter into the very sub- 
stance of that character. "For as he thinketh in 
his heart," said Solomon, "so is he." It is a say- 
ing, obviously, that one may easily fill with fan- 

[7] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

tastic meanings, as the prevailing gabble of the 
mental healers, New Thoughters, efficiency engi- 
neers, professors of scientific salesmanship and 
other such mountebanks demonstrates, but never- 
theless it is one grounded, at bottom, upon an in- 
dubitable fact. Deep down in every man there 
is a body of congenital attitudes, a corpus of in- 
eradicable doctrines and ways of thinking, that 
determines his reactions to his ideational environ- 
ment as surely as his physical activity is determined 
by the length of his tibice and the capacity of his 
lungs. These primary attitudes, in fact, consti- 
tute the essential man. It is by recognition of 
them that one arrives at an accurate understanding 
of his place and function as a member of human 
society; it is by a shrewd reckoning and balancing 
of them, one against another, that one forecasts his 
probable behaviour in the face of unaccustomed 
stimuli. 

All the arts and sciences that have to do with 
the management of men in the mass are founded 
upon a proficient practice of that sort of reckon- 
ing. The practical politician, as every connoisseur 
of ochlocracy knows, is not a man who seeks to 
inoculate the innumerable caravan of voters with 

[8] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and 
prick into energy the basic ideas that are already 
in them, and to turn the resultant effervescence of 
emotion to his own uses. And so with the religious 
teacher, the social and economic reformer, and 
every other variety of popular educator, down 
to and including the humblest press-agent of a fifth 
assistant Secretary of State, moving-picture actor, 
or Y. M. C. A. boob-squeezing committee. Such 
adept professors of conviction and enthusiasm, in 
the true sense, never actually teach anything new; 
all they do is to give new forms to beliefs already 
in being, to arrange the bits of glass, onyx, horn, 
ivory, porphyry and corundum in the mental kal- 
eidoscope of the populace into novel permutations. 
To change the figure, they may give the medulla 
oblongata, the cerebral organ of the great masses 
of simple men, a powerful diuretic or emetic, but 
they seldom, if ever, add anything to its primary 
supply of fats, proteids and carbohydrates. 

One speaks of the great masses of simple men, 
and it is of them, of course, that the ensuing treatise 
chiefly has to say. The higher and more delicately 
organized tribes and sects of men are susceptible 
to no such ready anatomizing, for the body of be- 

[9] 



4- 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

liefs upon which their ratiocination grounds it- 
self is not fixed but changing, and not artless and 
crystal-clear but excessively complex and obscure. 
It is, indeed, the chief mark of a man emerged 
from the general that he has lost most of his orig- 
inal certainties, and is full of a scepticism which 
plays like a spray of acid upon all the ideas 
that come within his purview, including especially 
his own. One does not become surer as one ad- 
vances in knowledge, but.less sure. No article of 
faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of 
increasing information; one might almost describe 
the acquirement of knowledge as a process of dis- 
illusion. But among the humbler ranks of men 
who make up the great bulk of every civilized peo- 
ple the increase of information is so slow and so 
arduous that this effect is scarcely to be discerned. 
If, in the course of long years, they gradually lose 
their old faiths, it is only to fill the gaps with new 
faiths that restate the old ones in new terms. Noth- 
ing, in fact, could be more commonplace than the 
observation that the crazes which periodically rav- 
age the proletariat today are, in the main, no more 
than distorted echoes of delusions cherished cen- 
turies ago. The fundamental religious ideas of the 

[10] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

lower orders of Christendom have not changed ma- 
terially in two thousand years, and they were old 
when they were first borrowed from the heathen of 
northern Africa and Asia Minor. The Iowa Meth- 
odist of today, imagining him competent to under- 
stand them^at all, would be able to accept the tenets 
of Augustine without changing more than a few ac- 
cents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday his 
raucous ecclesiastics batter his ears with diluted 
and debased filches from De Civitate Dei, and al- 
most every article of .his practical ethics may be 
found clearly stated in the eminent bishop's Ninety- 
third Epistle. And so in politics. The Bolsheviki 
of the present not only poll-parrot the balderdash of 
the French demagogues of 1789; they also mouth 
what was gospel to every bete blonde in the Teu- 
tonic forest of the fifth century. Truth^hifts and 
changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is 
never precisely the same at two successive instants. 
But error flows down the channel of history like 
some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic 
glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a 
world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that 
gives human society the small stability that it needs, 
amid all the oscillation of a gelatinous cosmos, to 

[11] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without 
their dreams men would have fallen upon and de- 
voured one another long ago — and yet every dream 
is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie. 

Nevertheless, this immutability of popular ideas 
is not quite perfect. The main current, no doubt, 
goes on unbrokenly, but there are many eddies 
along the edges and many small tempests on the 
surface. Thus the aspect changes, if not the sub- 
stance. What men believe in one century is ap- 
parently abandoned in some other century, and 
perhaps supplanted by something quite to the con- 
trary. Or, at all events, to the contrary in ap- 
pearance. Off goes the head of the king, and 
tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems 
h abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom 
hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. 
Then another cycle, and another. But under the 
play of all these opposites there is something fun- 
damental and permanent — the basic delusion that 
men may be governed and yet be free. It is only 
on the surface that there are transformations — 
and these we must study and make the most of, for 
of what is underneath men are mainly unconscious. 
The thing that colours the upper levels is largely 

[12] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the instinctive functioning of race and nationality, 
the ineradicable rivalry of tribe and tribe, the pri- 
mary struggle for existence. At bottom, no doubt, 
the plain men of the whole world are almost in- 
distinguishably alike; a learned anthropologist, 
Prof. Dr. Boas, has written a book to prove it. 
But, collected into herds, they gather delusions that 
are special to herds. Beside the underlying mass 
thinking there is a superimposed group thinking — 
a sort of unintelligent class consciousness. This 
we may prod into. This, in the case of the Homo 
americanus, is what is prodded into in the present 
work. We perform, it seems to us, a useful pion- 
eering. Incomplete though our data may be, it is 
at least grounded upon a resolute avoidance of a 
priori methods, an absolutely open-minded effort to 
get at the facts. We pounce upon them as they 
bob up, convinced that even the most inconsider- 
able of them may have its profound significance — 
that the essential may be hidden in the trivial. All 
we aim at is a first marshalling of materials, an 
initial running of lines. We are not architects, 
but furnishers of bricks, nails and laths. But it 
is our hope that what we thus rake up and pile 
into a rough heap may yet serve the purposes of 

[13] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

an organizer, and so help toward the establish- 
ment of the dim and vacillating truth, and rid the 
scene of, at all events, the worst and most obvious 
of its present accumulation of errors. 



In the case of the American of the multitude that 
accumulation of errors is of astounding bulk and 
consequence. His ideas are not only grossly mis- 
apprehended by all foreigners; they are often mis- 
apprehended by his own countrymen of superior 
education, and even by himself. 

This last, at first blush, may seem a mere effort 
at paradox, but its literal truth becomes patent on 
brief inspection. Ask the average American what 
is the salient passion in his emotional armamen- 
tarium — what is the idea that lies at the bottom 
of all his other ideas — and it is very probable that, 
nine times out of ten, he will nominate his hot and 
unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards him- 
self, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in 
the whole world, and all its other advocates as 
no more than his followers, half timorous and half 
envious. To question his ardour is to insult him 
as grievously as if one questioned the honour of 

[14] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the republic or the chastity of his wife. And yet 
it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that 
this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, 
has lost a large part of its old burning reality 
and descended to the estate of a mere phosphores- 
cent superstition. The American of today, in fact, 
probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other 
man of Christendom, and even his political liberty 
is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain 
theories of government are virtuous and lawful 
and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limit- 
ing the radius of his free activity multiply year 
by year: it is now practically impossible for him 
to exhibit anything describable as genuine indi- 
viduality, either in action or in thought, without run- 1 
ning afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty, i 
It would surprise no impartial observer if the 
motto. In God we trust, were one day expunged 
from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at 
Washington, and the far more appropriate word, 
Verboten, substituted. Nor would it astound any 
save the most romantic if, at the same time, the 
goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars 
to make room for a has relief of a policeman in a 
spiked helmet. 

[15] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly 
progressive) decay of freedom goes almost with- 
out challenge; the American has grown so accus- 
tomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and 
to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms 
of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents pro- 
vocateurs that he no longer makes any serious pro- 
test. It is surely a significant fact that, in the 
face of the late almost incredible proceedings un- 
der the so-called Espionage Act and other such 
laws, the only objections heard of came either from 
the persons directly affected — nine-tenths of them 
Socialists, pacifists, or citizens accused of German 
sympathies, and hence without any rights whatever 
in American law and equity — or from a small 
group of professional libertarians, chiefly natural- 
ized aliens. The American people, as a people, 
acquiesced docilely in all these tyrannies, both 
during the war and after the war, just as they 
acquiesced in the invasion of their common rights 
\ by the Prohibition Amendment. Worse, they not 
I only acquiesced docilely; they approved actively; 
they were quite as hotly against the few protestants 
as they were against the original victims, and gave 
their hearty approbation to every proposal that 

[16] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the former be punished too. The really startling 
phenomenon of the war, indeed, was not the gro- 
tesque abolition of liberty in the name of liberty, 
but the failure of that usurpation to arouse any- 
thing approaching public indignation. It is im- 
possible to imagine the men of Jackson's army or 
even of Grant's army submitting to any such ab- 
solutism without a furious struggle, but in these 
latter days it is viewed with the utmost compla- 
cency. The descendants of the Americans who 
punished John Adams so melodramatically for the 
Alien and Seditions Acts of 1789 failed to raise a 
voice against the far more drastic legislation of 
1917. What is more, they failed to raise a voice 
against its execution upon the innocent as well as 
upon the guilty, in gross violation of the most ele- 
mental principles of justice and rules of law. 

Thus the Americano, put to the test, gave the 
lie to what is probably his proudest boast, and 
revealed the chronic human incapacity for ac- 
curate self-analysis. But if he thereby misjudged 
and misjudges himself, he may find some consola- 
tion for his error in the lavishness with which even 
worse misjudgment is heaped upon him by for- 
eigners. To this day, despite the intimate contact 

[17] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

of five long years of joint war, the French and the 
English are ignorant of his true character, and 
show it in their every discussion of him, partic- 
ularly when they discuss him in camera. It is the 
secret but general view of the French, we are in- 
formed by confidential agents, that he is a fellow 
of loose life and not to be trusted with either a 
wine-pot, a virgin or a domestic fowl — an absurdly 
inaccurate generalization from the aberrations of 
soldiers in a far land, cut off from the moral repres- 
sions that lie upon them and colour all their acts 
at home. It is the view of the English, so we hear 
upon equally reliable authority, that he is an ear- 
nest but extremely inefficient oaf, incapable of 
either the finer technic of war or of its machine- 
like discipline — another thumping error, for the 
American is actually extraordinarily adept and 
ingenious in the very arts that modem war chiefly 
makes use of, and there is, since the revolt of the 
Prussian, no other such rigidly regimented man 
in the world. He has, indeed, reached such a pass 
in the latter department that it has become almost 
impossible for him to think of himself save as an 
obedient member of some vast, powerful and unin- 
telligibly despotic organization — a church, a trades- 

[18] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

union, a political party, a tin-pot fraternal order, 
or what not — , and often he is a member of more 
than one, and impartially faithful to all. More- 
over, as we have seen, he lives under laws which 
dictate almost every detail of his public and private 
conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline 
with the most appalling rigour; and these laws are 
enforced by police who supply the chance gaps in 
them extempore, and exercise that authority in 
the best manner of prison guards, animal trainers 
and drill sergeants. 

The English and the French, beside these spe- 
cial errors, have a full share in an error that is 
also embraced by practically every other foreign 
people. This is the error of assuming, almost as 
an axiom beyond question, that the Americans are 
a sordid, money-grubbing people, with no thought 
above the dollar. You will find it prevailing ev- 
erywhere on the Continent of Europe. To the Ger- 
man the United States is Dollarica, and the salient 
American personality, next to the policeman who 
takes bribes and the snuffling moralist in office, is 
the Dollarprinzessin. To the Italian the country 
is a sort of savage wilderness in which everything 
else, from religion to beauty and from decent re- 

[19] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

pose to human life, is sacrificed to profit. Italians 
cross the ocean in much the same spirit that our 
runaway school-boys used to go off to fight the 
Indians. Some, lucky, return home in a few years 
with fortunes and gaudy tales; others, succumbing 
to the natives, are butchered at their labour and 
buried beneath the cinders of hideous and God- 
forsaken mining towns. All carry the thought of 
escape from beginning to end; every Italian hopes 
to get away with his takings as soon as possible, to 
enjoy them on some hillside where life and prop- 
erty are reasonably safe from greed. So with the 
Russian, the Scandinavian, the Balkan hillman, 
even the Greek and Armenian. The picture of 
America that they conjure up is a picture of a ti- 
tanic and merciless struggle for gold, with the 
stakes high and the contestants correspondingly 
ferocious. They see the American as one to whom 
nothing under the sun has any value save the dol- 
lar — ^not truth, or beauty, or philosophical ease, or 
the common decencies between man and man. 

This view, of course, is full of distortion and 
misunderstanding, despite the fact that even Amer- 
icans, by hearing it stated so often, have come to 
allow it a good deal of soundness. The American's 

[20] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

concept of himself, as we have seen, is sometimes 
anything but accurate; in this case he errs almost 
as greatly as when he venerates himself as the 
prince of freemen, with gyveless wrists and flash- 
ing eyes. As for the foreigner, what he falls into 
is the typically Freudian blunder of projecting 
his own worst weakness into another. The fact is 
that it is he, and not the native American, who is 
the incorrigible and unimaginative money-grubber. 
He comes to the United States in search of money, 
and in search of money alone, and pursuing that 
single purpose without deviation he makes the mis- 
take of assuming that the American is at the same 
business, and in the same fanatical manner. From 
all the complex and colourful life of the country, 
save only the one enterprise of money-making, he 
is shut off almost hermetically, and so he concludes 
that that one enterprise embraces the whole show. 
Here the unreliable promptings of his sub-conscious 
passion are helped out by observations that are 
more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, ex- 
cluded from all free social intercourse with the 
native, and regarded as, if actually human at all, 
then at least a distinctly inferior member of the 
species, he is forced into the harshest and most ill- 

[21] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

paid labour, and so he inevitably sees the American 
as a pitiless task-master and ascribes the exploita- 
tion he is made a victim of to a fabulous exaggera- 
tion of his own avarice. 

Moreover, the greater success and higher posi- 
tion of the native seem to bear out this notion. 
In a struggle that is free for all and to the death, 
the native grabs all the shiniest stakes. Ergo, 
he must love money even more than the immi- 
grant. This logic we do not defend, but there is 
— and out of it grows the prevailing foreign 
view of America and the Americans, for the for- 
eigner who stays at home does not derive his 
ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. 
Wilson or from the passionate idealism of such 
superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, Adolph 
S. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, 
Marcus Loew, Henry Morgenthau, Abram Elkus, 
Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, Julius Rosen- 
wald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph 
Zukor, the Hon. Julius Kahn, Simon Guggenheim, 
Stephen S. Wise and Barney Baruch, but from the 
hair-raising tales of returned "Americans," i.e., 
fellow peasants who, having braved the dragons, 
have come back to the fatherland to enjoy their 
booty and exhibit their wounds. 

[22] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

The native, as we say, has been so far influenced 
by this error that he cherishes it himself, or, more 
accurately, entertains it with shame. Most of his 
windy idealism is no more than a reaction against 
it — an evidence of an effort to confute it and live 
it down. He is never more sweetly flattered than 
when some politician eager for votes or some 
evangelist itching for a good plate tells him that 
he is actually a soaring altruist, and the only real 
one in the world. This is the surest way to fetch 
him; he never fails to swell out his chest when he 
hears that buncombe. In point of fact, of course, 
he is no more an altruist than any other healthy 
mammal. His ideals, one and all, are grounded 
upon self-interest, or upon the fear that is at the 
bottom of it; his benevolence always has a string 
tied to it; he could no more formulate a course of 
action to his certain disadvantage than an English- 
man could, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a 
German. But to say that the advantage he pur- 
sues is always, or even usually, a monetary one — 
to argue that he is avaricious, or even, in these later 
years, a sharp trader — is to spit directly into the 
eye of the truth. There is probably, indeed, no 
country in the world in which mere money is held 

[23] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

in less esteem than in these United States. Even 
more than the Russian Bolshevik the American 
democrat regards wealth with suspicion, and its too 
eager amassment with a bilious eye. Here alone, 
west of the Dvina, rich men are ipso facto scoun- 
drels and ferce naturae, with no rights that any 
slanderer is bound to respect. Here alone, the 
possession of a fortune puts a man automatically 
upon the defensive, and exposes him to special leg- 
islation of a rough and inquisitorial character and 
to the special animosity of judges, district attorneys 
and juries. It would be a literal impossibility for 
an Englishman worth $100,000,000 to avoid pub- 
lic ofl&ce and public honour; it would be equally 
impossible for an American worth $100,000,000 
to obtain either. 

Americans, true enough, enjoy an average of 
prosperity that is above that witnessed in any other 
country. Their land, with less labour, yields a 
greater usufruct than other land; they get more 
money for their industry; they jingle more coin 
in their pockets than other peoples. But it is a 
grievous error to mistake that superior opulence 
for a sign of money-hunger, for they actually hold 
money very lightly, and spend a great deal more 

[24] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

of it than any other race of men and with far less 
thought of values. The normal French family, it 
is often said, could live very comfortably for a 
week upon what the normal American family 
wastes in a week. There is, among Americans, 
not the slightest sign of the unanimous French habit 
of biting every franc, of calculating the cost of 
every luxury to five places of decimals, of utilizing 
every scrap, of sleeping with the bankbook under 
the pillow. Whatever is showy gets their dollars, 
whether they need it or not, even whether they can 
afford it or not. They are, so to speak, constantly 
on a bust, their eyes alert for chances to get rid 
of their small change. 

Consider, for example, the amazing readiness 
with which they succumb to the imbecile bait of 
advertising! An American manufacturer, finding 
himself with a stock of unsalable goods or encount- 
ering otherwise a demand that is less than his 
production, does not have to look, like his English 
or German colleague, for foreign dumping grounds. 
He simply packs his surplus in gaudy packages, 
sends for an advertising agent, joins an Honest- 
Advertising club, fills the newspapers and maga- 
zines with lying advertisements, and sits down in 

[25] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

peace while his countrymen fight their way to his 
counters. That they will come is almost abso- 
lutely sure; no matter how valueless the goods, they 
will leap to the advertisements; their one desire 
seems to be to get rid of their money. As a con- 
sequence of this almost pathological eagerness, the 
advertising bill of the American people is greater 
than that of all other peoples taken together. 
There is scarcely an article within the range of 
their desires that does not carry a heavy load of ad- 
vertising; they actually pay out millions every year 
to be sold such commonplace necessities as sugar, 
towels, collars, lead-pencils and corn-meal. The 
business of thus bamboozling them and picking 
their pockets enlists thousands and thousands of 
artists, writers, printers, sign-painters and other 
such parasites. Their towns are bedaubed with 
chromatic eye-sores and made hideous with flash- 
ing lights ; their countryside is polluted ; their news- 
papers and magazines become mere advertising 
sheets; idiotic slogans and apothegms are invented 
to enchant them; in some cities they are actually 
taxed to advertise the local makers of wooden nut- 
megs. Multitudes of swindlers are naturally in- 
duced to adopt advertising as a trade, and some of 

[26] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

them make great fortunes at it. Like all other 
men who live by their wits, they regard themeslves 
as superior fellows, and every year they hold great 
conventions, bore each other with learned papers 
upon the psychology of their victims, speak of one 
another as men of genius, have themselves photo- 
graphed by the photographers of newspapers eager 
I to curry favour with them, denounce the govern- 
ment for not spending the public funds for adver- 
tising, and summon United States Senators, eminent 
chautauquans and distinguished vaudeville stars to 
entertain them. For all this the plain people pay 
I the bill, and never a protest comes out of them. 
I As a matter of fact, the only genuinely thrifty 
( folks among us, in the sense that a Frenchman, a 
I Scot or an Italian is thrifty, are the immigrants of 
I the most recent invasions. That is why they oust 
* the native wherever the two come into contact — 
. say in New England and in the Middle West. 
I They acquire, bit by bit, the best lands, the best 
j stock, the best bams, not because they have the se- 
j cret of making more money, but because they have 
I the resolution to spend less. As soon as 
! they become thoroughly Americanized they be- 
j gin to show the national prodigality. The old 

[27] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

folks wear home-made clothes and stick to the farm; 
the native-born children order their garments from 
mail-order tailors and expose themselves in the 
chautauquas and at the great orgies of Calvinism 
and Wesleyanism. The old folks put every dollar 
they can wring from a reluctant environment into 
real property or the banks; the young folks put 
their inheritance into phonographs, Fords, boiled 
shirts, yellow shoes, cuckoo clocks, lithographs of 
the current mountebanks, oil stock, automatic 
pianos and the works of Harold Bell Wright, Ger- 
ald Stanley Lee and 0. Henry, 

in 

But what, then, is the character that actually 
marks the American — that is, in chief? If he is 
not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks 
he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps 
upon the chest when he is full of rhetoric, nor the 
degraded dollar-chaser of European legend, then 
what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, 
for the problem is complex and there is but little 
illumination of it in the literature; nevertheless, we 
offer it in the firm conviction, bom of twenty years' 
incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct. 

[28] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

It is, in brief, this: that the thing which sets off the 
American from all other men, and gives a peculiar 
colour not only to the pattern of his daily life but 
also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for 
want of a more exact term, may be called social 
aspiration. That is to say, his dominant passion 
, is a passion to lift himself by at least a step or two 
I in the society that he is a part of — a passion to im- 
prove his position, to break down some shadowy 
' barrier of caste, to achieve the countenance of 
what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and 
accepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. 
I His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the 
' ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his 
\ secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, 
j group themselves about the yearning to grasp it. 
j Here we have an explanation of the curious rest- 
I lessness that educated foreigners, as opposed to 
mere immigrants, always make a note of in the 
country; it is half aspiration and half impatience, 
with overtones of dread and timorousness. The 
American is violently eager to get on, and thor- 
oughly convinced that his merits entitle him to 
try and to succeed, but by the same token he is 
sickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of 

[29] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the second fact, as we shall see, spring some of his 
most characteristic traits. He is a man vexed, at 
one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur 
and an inferiority complex; he is both egotistical 
and subservient, assertive and politic, blatant and 
shy. Most of the errors about him are made by 
seeing one side of him and being blind to the other. 
Such a thing as a secure position is practically 
unknown among us. There is no American who 
cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, if 
he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast 
impediment to his progress. But neither is there 
any American who doesn't have to keep on fighting 
for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is 
there to protect him if he slips. One observes 
every day the movement of individuals, families, 
whole groups, in both directions. All of our cities 
are full of brummagem aristocrats — aristocrats, at 
all events, in the view of their neighbours — whose 
grandfathers, or even fathers, were day labourers; 
and working for them, supported by them, heavily 
patronized by them, are clerks whose grandfathers 
were lords of the soil. The older societies of Eu- 
rope, as every one knows, protect their caste lines 
a great deal more resolutely. It is as impossible 

[30] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

for a wealthy pork packer or company promoter 
to enter the noblesse of Austria, even today, as it 
would be for him to enter the boudoir of a queen; 
he is barred out absolutely and even his grand- 
children are under the ban. And in precisely the 
same way it is as impossible for a count of the 
old Holy Roman Empire to lose caste as it would 
be for the Dalai Lama; he may sink to unutterable 
depths within his order, but he cannot get himself 
out of it, nor can he lose the peculiar advantages 
that go with membership; he is still a Graf, and, 
as such, above the herd. Once, in a Madrid cafe, 
the two of us encountered a Spanish marquis who 
wore celluloid cuffs, suffered from pediculosis and 
had been drunk for sixteen years. Yet he re- 
mained a marquis in good standing, and all lesser 
Spaniards, including Socialists, envied him and 
deferred to him; none would have dreamed of 
slapping him on the back. Knowing that he was 
quite as safe within his ancient order as a dog 
among the canidce, he gave no thought to appear- 
ances. But in the same way he knew that he had 
reached his limit — that no conceivable effort could 
lift him higher. He was a grandee of Spain and 
that was all; above glimmered royalty and the 

[31] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

hierarchy of the saints, and both royalty and the 
hierarchy of the saints were as much beyond him 
as grandeeism was beyond the polite and well-edu- 
cated head-waiter who laved him with ice-water 
when he had mania-a-potu. 

No American is ever so securely lodged. There 
is always something just ahead of him, beckoning 
him and tantalizing him, and there is always some- 
thing just behind him, menacing him and causing 
him to sweat. Even when he attains to what may 
seem to be security, that security is very fragile. 
The English soap-boiler, brewer, shyster attorney 
or stock-jobber, once he has got into the House of 
Lords, is reasonably safe, and his children after 
him ; the possession of a peerage connotes a definite 
rank, and it is as permanent as anything can be 
in this world. But in America there is no such 
harbour; the ship is eternally at sea. Money van- 
ishes, official dignity is forgotten, caste lines are 
as full of gaps as an ill-kept hedge. The grand- 
father of the Vanderbilts was a bounder; the last 
of the Washingtons is a petty employe in the Li- 
brary of Congress. 

It is this constant possibility of rising, this con- 
stant risk of falling, that gives a barbaric pic- 

[32] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

turesqueness to the panorama of what is called 
fashionable society in America. The chief char- 
acter of that society is to be found in its shame- 
less self-assertion, its almost obscene display of its 
importance and of the shadowy privileges and ac- 
ceptances on which that importance is based. It 
is assertive for the simple reason that, immediately 
it ceased to be assertive, it would cease to exist. 
Structurally, it is composed in every town of a 
nucleus of those who have laboriously arrived and 
a chaotic mass of those who are straining every 
eflfort to get on. The effort must be made against 
great odds. Those who have arrived are eager to 
keep down the competition of newcomers; on their 
exclusiveness, as the phrase is, rests the whole of 
their social advantage. Thus the candidate from 
below, before horning in at last, must put up with 
an infinity of rebuff and humiliation; he must 
sacrifice his self-respect today in order to gain the 
hope of destroying the self-respect of other aspir- 
ants tomorrow. The result is that the whole edi- 
fice is based upon fears and abasements, and that 
every device which promises to protect the indi- 
vidual against them is seized upon eagerly. Fash- 
ionable society in America therefore has no room 

[33] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

for intelligence; within its fold an original idea is 
dangerous; it carries regimentation, in dress, in so- 
cial customs and in political and even religious 
doctrines, to the last degree. In the American 
cities the fashionable man or woman must not 
only maintain the decorum seen among civilized 
folks everywhere; he or she must also be inter- 
ested in precisely the right sports, theatrical shows 
and opera singers, show the right political creduli- 
ties and indignations, and have some sort of con- 
nection with the right church. Nearly always, be- 
cause of the apeing of English custom that pre- 
vails everywhere in America, it must be the so- 
called Protestant Episcopal Church, a sort of out- 
house of the Church of England, with ecclesiastics 
who imitate the English sacerdotal manner much 
as small boys imitate the manner of eminent base- 
ball players. Every fashionable Protestant Epis- 
copal congregation in the land is full of ex-Bap- 
tists and ex-Mediodists who have shed Calvinism, 
total immersion and the hallelujah hymns on their 
way up the ladder. The same impulse leads the 
Jews, whenever the possibility of invading the cita- 
del of the Christians begins to bemuse them (as 
happened during the late war, for example, when 

[34] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

patriotism temporarily adjourned the usual taboos), 
to embrace Christian Science — as a sort of half- 
way station, so to speak, more medical than Chris- 
tian, and hence secure against ordinary derisions. 
And it is an impulse but little different which lies 
at the bottom of the much-discussed title-hunt. 

A title, however paltry, is of genuine social value, 
more especially in America; it represents a status 
that cannot be changed overnight by the rise of 
rivals, or by personal dereliction, or by mere ac- 
cident. It is a policy of insurance against dangers 
that are not to be countered as effectively in any 

other manner. Miss G , the daughter of an 

enormously wealthy scoundrel, may be accepted 
everywhere, but all the while she is insecure. Her 
father may lose his fortune tomorrow, or be jailed 
by newspaper outcry, or marry a prostitute and so 
commit social suicide himself and murder his 
daughter, or she herself may fall a victim to some 
rival's superior machinations, or stoop to fornica- 
tion of some forbidden variety, or otherwise get 
herself under the ban. But once she is a duchess, 
she is safe. No catastrophe short of divorce can 
take away her coronet, and even divorce will leave 
the purple marks of it upon her brow. Most 

[35] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

valuable boon of all, she is now free to be herself, 
— a rare, rare experience for an American. She 
may, if she likes, go about in a Mother Hubbard, or 
join the Seventh Day Adventists, or declare for the 
Bolsheviki, or wash her own lingerie, or have her 
hair bobbed, and still she will remain a duchess, 
and, as a duchess, irremovably superior to the gap- 
ing herd of her political equals. 

This social aspiration, of course, is most vividly 
violent and idiotic on its higher and more gaudy 
levels, but it is scarcely less earnest below. Every 
American, however obscure, has formulated within 
his secret recesses some concept of advancement, 
however meagre; if he doesn't aspire to be what is 
called fashionable, then he at least aspires to lift 
himself in some less gorgeous way. There is not 
a social organization in this land of innumerable 
associations that hasn't its waiting list of candidates 
who are eager to get in, but have not yet demon- 
strated their fitness for the honour. One can 
scarcely go low enough to find that pressure absent. 
Even the tin-pot fraternal orders, which are con- 
stantly cadging for members and seem to accept any 
one not a downright felon, are exclusive in their 
[36] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

fantastic way, and no doubt there are hundreds of 
thousands of proud American freemen, the heirs of 
Washington and Jefferson, their liberty safe- 
guarded by a million guns, who pine in secret be- 
cause they are ineligible to membership in the 
Masons, the Odd Fellows or even the Knights of 
Pythias. On the distaff side, the thing is too 
obvious to need exposition. The patriotic societies 
among women are all machines for the resuscita- 
tion of lost superiorities. The plutocracy has 
shouldered out the old gentry from actual social 
I leadership — that gentry, indeed, presents a prodi- 
I gious clinical picture of the insecurity of social 
rank in America — but there remains at least the 
' possibility of insisting upon a dignity which pluto- 
, crats cannot boast and may not even buy. Thus 
the county judge's wife in Smithville or the 
Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestown consoles 
\ herself for the lack of an opera box with the 
I thought (constantly asserted by badge and resolu- 
j tion) that she had a nobler grandfather, or, at all 
I events, a decenter one, than the Astors, the Van- 
I derbilts and the Goulds. 



[37] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

IV 

It seems to us that the genuine characters of the 
normal American, the characters which set him off 
most saliently from the men of other nations, are 
the fruits of all this risk of and capacity for change 
in status that we have described, and of the dreads 
and hesitations that go therewith. The Ameri- 
can is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of 
mind and act that one would look for in a man in- 
satiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to 
wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant 
assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, 
of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of 
conformity, caution and subservience. He is for- 
ever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to 
defend them with his last drop of blood, and for- 
ever yielding them up at the first demand. Under 
both the pretension and the fact is the common 
motive of fear — in brief, the common motive of the 
insecure and uncertain man, the average man, at 
all times and everywhere, but especially the motive 
of the average man in a social system so crude and 
unstable as ours. 

"More than any other people," said Wendell 
[38] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

Phillips one blue day, "we Americans are afraid 
of one another." The saying seems harsh. It 
goes counter to the national delusion of uncompro- 
mising courage and limitless truculence. It wars 
upon the national vanity. But all the same there 
is truth in it. Here, more than anywhere else on 
i earth, the status of an individual is determined by 
the general consent of the general body of his fel- 
lows; here, as we have seen, there are no artificial 
barriers to protect him against their disapproval, or 
j even against their envy. And here, more than any- 
j where else, the general consent of that general body 
^ of men is coloured by the ideas and prejudices of 
the inferior majority; here, there is the nearest ap- 
1 proach to genuine democracy, the most direct and 
I accurate response to mob emotions. Facing that 
I infinitely powerful but inevitably ignorant and 
' cruel corpus of opinion, the individual must needs 
j adopt caution and fall into timorousness. The de- 
I sire within him may be bold and forthright, but its 
I satisfaction demands discretion, prudence, a politic 
[ and ingratiating habit. The walls are not to be 
I stormed ; they must be wooed to a sort of Jerichoan 
I fall. Success thus takes the form of a series of 
j waves of protective colouration; failure is a sue- 

[39] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

cession of unmaskings. The aspirant must first 
learn to imitate exactly the aspect and behaviour of 
the group he seeks to penetrate. There follows 
notice. There follows toleration. There follows 
acceptance. 

Thus the hog-murderer's wife picks her way into 
the society of Chicago, the proud aristocracy of the 
abbatoir. And thus, no less, the former whiskey 
drummer insinuates himself into the Elks, and the 
rising retailer wins the imprimatur of whole- 
salers, and the rich peasant becomes a planter and 
the father of doctors of philosophy, and the servant 
girl enters the movies and acquires the status of a 
princess of the blood, and the petty attorney be- 
comes a legislator and statesman, and Schmidt 
turns into Smith, and the newspaper reporter be- 
comes a litterateur on the staff of the Saturday 
Evening Post, and all of us Yankees creep up, up, 
up. The business is never to be accomplished by 
headlong assault. It must be done circumspectly, 
insidiously, a bit apologetically, pianissimo; there 
must be no flaunting of unusual ideas, no bold 
prancing of an unaccustomed personality. Above 
all, it must be done without exciting fear, lest the 
portcullis fall and the whole enterprise go to pot. 

[40] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

Above all, the manner of a Jenkins must be 
got into it. 

That manner, of course, is not incompatible with 
a certain superficial boldness, nor even with an ap- 
pearance of truculence. But what lies beneath the 
boldness is not really an independent spirit, but 
merely a talent for crying with the pack. When 
the American is most dashingly assertive it is a sure 
sign th^t he feels the pack behind him, and hears 
its comforting baying, and is well aware that his 
doctrine is approved. He is not a joiner for noth- 
ing. He joins something, whether it be a political 
party, a church, a fraternal order or one of the 
idiotic movements that incessantly ravage the land, 
because joining gives him a feeling of security, 
because it makes him a part of something larger and 
safer than he is himself, because it gives him a 
chance to work off steam without running any risk. 
The whole thinking of the country thus runs down 
the channel of mob emotion ; there is no actual con- 
flict of ideas, but only a succession of crazes. It 
is inconvenient to stand aloof from these crazes, 
and it is dangerous to oppose them. In no other 
country in the world is there so ferocious a short 
way with dissenters; in none other is it socially so 

[41] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

costly to heed the inner voice and to be one's own 
man. 

Thus encircled by taboos, the American shows 
an extraordinary timorousness in all his dealings 
with fundamentals, and the fact that many of these 
taboos are self-imposed only adds to their rigour. 
What every observant foreigner first notices, can- 
vassing the intellectual life of the land, is the shy 
and gingery manner in which all the larger prob- 
lems of existence are dealt with. We have, for 
example, positive laws which make it practically 
impossible to discuss the sex question with anything 
approaching honesty. The literature of the sub- 
ject is enormous, and the general notion of its im- 
portance is thereby made manifest, but all save a 
very small part of that literature is produced by 
quacks and addressed to an audience that is afraid 
to hear the truth. So in politics. Almost alone 
among the civilized nations of the world, the United 
States pursues critics of the dominant political 
theory with mediaeval ferocity, condemning them to 
interminable periods in prison, proceeding against 
them by clamour and perjury, treating them worse 
than common blacklegs, and at times conniving at 
their actual murder by the police. And so, above 

[42] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

all, in religion. This is the only country of 

Christendom in which there is no anti-clerical party, 

and hence no constant and effective criticism of 

clerical pretension and corruption. The result is 

that all of the churches reach out for tyranny 

among us, and that most of them that show any 

numerical strength already exercise it. In half 

i a dozen of our largest cities the Catholic Church is 

actually a good deal more powerful than it is in 

Spain, or even in Austria. Its acts are wholly 

above public discussion ; it makes and breaks public 

I officials; it holds the newspapers in terror; it in- 

Ifluences the police and the courts; it is strong 

( enough to destroy and silence any man who objects 

, to its polity. But this is not all. The Catholic 

I Church, at worst, is an organization largely devoted 

I to perfectly legitimate and even laudable purposes, 

\ and it is controlled by a class of men who are 

^ largely above popular passion, and intelligent 

I enough to see beyond the immediate advantage. 

j More important still, its international character 

^ gives it a detached and superior point of view, and 

I so makes it stand aloof from some of the common 

1 weaknesses of the native mob. This is constantly 

j revealed by its opposition to Prohibition, vice- 

[43] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

crusading and other such crazes of the disinherited 
and unhappy. The rank and file of its members 
are ignorant and emotional and are thus almost 
ideal cannon-fodder for the bogus reformers who 
operate upon the proletariat, but they are held back 
by their clergy, to whose superior interest in gen- 
uine religion is added a centuries-old heritage of 
worldly wisdom. Thus the Church of Rome, in 
America at least, is a civilizing agency, and we may 
well overlook its cynical alliance with political cor- 
ruption in view of its steady enmity to that greater 
corruption which destroys the very elements of lib- 
erty, peace and human dignity. It may be a bit 
too intelligently selfish and harshly realistic, but it 
is assuredly not swinish. 

This adjective, however, fits the opposition as 
snugly as a coat of varnish — and by the opposition 
we mean the group of Protestant churches com- 
monly called evangelical, to wit, the Methodist, the 
Baptist, the Presbyterian and their attendant imita- 
tors and inferiors. It is out of this group that 
the dominating religious attitude of the American 
people arises, and, in particular, it is from this 
group that we get our doctrine that religious activity 
is not to be challenged, however flagrantly it may 

[44] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

stand in opposition to common honesty and com- 
mon sense. Under cover of that artificial tolera- 
tion — the product, not of a genuine liberalism, but 
simply of a mob distrust of dissent — there goes on 
a tyranny that it would be difficult to match in 
modem history. Save in a few large cities, every 
American community lies under a sacerdotal 
despotism whose devices are disingenuous and dis- 
honourable, and whose power was magnificently 
displayed in the campaign for Prohibition — a des- 
potism exercised by a body of ignorant, supersti- 
tious, self-seeking and thoroughly dishonest men. 
One may, without prejudice, reasonably defend the 
Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pur- 
sue an intelligible ideal and dignify it with a real 
sacrifice. But in the presence of the Methodist 
clergy it is difficult to avoid giving way to the weak- 
ness of indignation. What one observes is a horde 
of uneducated and inflammatory dunderheads, 
eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full 
of a childish vanity — a mob of holy clerks but 
little raised, in intelligence and dignity, above the 
forlorn half-wits whose souls they chronically rack. 
In the whole United States there is scarcely one 
among them who stands forth as a man of sense and 

[45] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

information. Illiterate in all save the elementals, 
untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk 
with their power over dolts, crazed by their im- 
munity to challenge by their betters, they carry 
over into the professional class of the country the 
spirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade 
religion to the estate of an idiotic phobia. There 
is not a village in America in which some such pre- 
posterous jackass is not in eruption. Worse, he 
is commonly the leader of its opinion — its pattern 
in reason, morals and good taste. Yet worse, he is 
ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped in his sacer- 
dotal cloak, he stands above any effective criticism. 
To question his imbecile ideas is to stand in con- 
tumacy of the revelation of God. 

A number of years ago, while engaged in 
journalism in a large American city, one of us 
violated all journalistic precedents by printing an 
article denouncing the local evangelical clergy as, 
with few exceptions, a pack of scoundrels, and 
offered in proof their brisk and constant trade in 
contraband marriages, especially the marriages of 
girls under the age of consent. He showed that the 
offer of a two dollar fee was sufficient to induce the 
majority of these ambassadors of Christ to marry 

[46] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

a girl of fourteen or fifteen to a boy a few years 
older. There followed a great outcry from the 
accused, with the usual demands that the offending 
paper print a retraction and discharge the guilty 
writer from its staff. He thereupon engaged a 
clipping bureau to furnish him with clippings from 
the newspapers of the whole country, showing the 
common activities of the evangelical clergy else- 
where. The result was that he received and re- 
printed an amazing mass of putrid scandal, greatly 
to the joy of that moral community. It appeared 
that these eminent Christian leaders were steadily 
engaged. North, East, South and West, in doings 
that would have disgraced so many ward heelers or 
oyster-shuckers — shady financial transactions, gross 
sexual irregularities, all sorts of minor crimes. 
The publication of this evidence from day to day 
gave the chronicler the advantage of the offensive, 
and so got him out of a tight place. In the end, as 
if tickled by his assault, the hierarchy of heaven 
came to his aid. That is to say, the Lord God 
Jehovah arranged it that one of the leading 
Methodist clergymen of the city — in fact, the 
chronicler's chief opponent — should be taken in an 
unmentionable sexual perversion at the head- 

[47] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

quarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, 
and so be forced to leave town between days. This 
catastrophe, as we say, the chronicler ascribes to 
divine intervention. It was entirely unexpected; 
he knew that the fellow was a liar and a rogue, but 
he had never suspected that he was also a hog. The 
episode demoralized tlie defence to such an extent 
that it was impossible, in decency, to go on with the 
war. The chronicler was at once, in fact, forced 
into hypocritical efforts to prevent the fugitive 
ecclesiastic's pursuit, extradition, trial and im- 
prisonment, and tliese efforts, despite their disin- 
genuous character, succeeded. Under another 
name, he now preaches Christ and Him crucified in 
the far West, and is, we daresay, a leading advocate 
of Prohibition, vice-crusading and the other Meth- 
odist reforms. 

But here we depart from the point. It is not 
that an eminent Wesleyan should be taken in crim. 
con. with a member of the Y. M. C. A. ; it is that the 
whole Wesleyan scheme of things, despite tlie enor- 
mous multiplication of such incidents, should still 
stand above all direct and devastating criticism in 
America. It is an ignorant and dishonest cult of 
ignorant and dishonest men, and yet no one has 

[4S] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

ever had at it from the front. All the news- 
paper clippings that we have mentioned were 
extraordinarily discreet. Every offence of a 
clergyman was presented as if it were an isolated 
phenomenon, and of no general significance; there 
was never any challenge of an ecclesiastical organ- 
ization which bred and sheltered such men, and 
carried over their curious ethics into its social and 
political activities. That careful avoidance of the 
main issue is always observable in These States. 
Prohibition was saddled upon the country, against 
the expressed wish of at least two-thirds of the 
people, by the political chicanery of the same organ- 
ization, and yet no one, during the long fight, 
thought to attack it directly; to have done so would 
have been to violate the taboo described. So when 
the returning soldiers began to reveal the astound- 
ing chicaneries of the Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation; it was marvelled at for a few weeks, as 
Americans always marvel at successful pocket- 
squeezings, but no one sought the cause in the char- 
acter of the pious brethren primarily responsible. 
And so, again, when what is called liberal opinion 
began to revolt against the foreign politics of Dr. 
Wilson, and in particular, against his apparent re- 

[49] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

pudiation of his most solenui engagements, and his 
complete insensibility', in tlie presence of a moral 
passion, to the most elementan' principles of pri- 
vate and public honour. A thousand critics, 
friendly and unfriendly, sought to account for his 
amazing shifts and evasions on unintelligible logi- 
cal grounds, but no one, so far as we know, ven- 
tured to point out tliat his course could be ac- 
counted for in ever>' detail, and witliout any maul- 
ing of the facts w*hatsoever, upon the simple gromid 
that he was a Presbyterian. 

We sincerely hope tliat no one will mistake us 
here for anarchists who seek to hold the Presby- 
terian code of ethics, or the Presbyterians them- 
selves, up to derision. \^'e confess frankly that, 
as private individuals, we are inclined against that 
code and that all our prejudices run against diose 
who subscribe to it — which is to say, in tlie direc- 
tion of toleration, of open dealing, and even of a 
certain mild snobbishness. We are both opposed to 
moral entlmsiasm, and never drink with a moral 
man if it can be avoided. Tlie taboos diat w^e per- 
sonally subscribe to are taboos upon the very tilings 
that Presbyterians hold most dear — for example, 
moral certaintv, the proselvtins: appetite, and what 

[50] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

may be described as the passion of the policeman. 
But we are surely not fatuous enough to cherish our 
ideas to the point of fondness. In the long run, 
we freely grant, it may turn out that the Presby- 
terians are right and we are wrong — in brief, that 
God loves a moral man more than he loves an 
amiable and honourable one. Stranger things, in- 
deed, have happened; one might even argue with- 
out absurdity that God is actually a Presbyterian 
Himself. Whether He is or is not we do not pre- 
sume to say; we simply record the fact that it is 
our present impression that He is not — and then 
straightway admit that our view is worth no more 
than that of any other pair of men. 

Meanwhile, however, it is certainly not going too 
far to notice the circumstance that there is an 
irreconcilable antithesis between the two sorts of 
men that we have described — diat a great moral 
passion is fatal to the gentler and more caressing 
amenities of life, and vice versa. The man of 
morals has a certain character, and the man of 
honour has a quite different character. No one 
not an idiot fails to differentiate between the two, 
or to order his intercourse with them upon an as- 
sumption of their disparity. What we know in the 

[51] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



United States as a Presbyterian is pre-eminently of 
the moral type. Perhaps more than any other man 
among us he regulates his life, and the lives of all 
who fall under his influence, upon a purely moral 
plan. In the main, he gets the principles underly- 
ing that plan from the Old Testament; if he is to 
be described succinctly, it is as one who carries 
over into modern life, with its superior complexity 
of sin, the simple and rigid ethical concepts of the 
ancient Jews. And in particular, he subscribes 
to their theory that it is virtuous to make things hot 
for the sinner, by which word he designates any 
person whose conduct violates the ordinances of 
God as he himself is aware of them and interprets 
them. Sin is to the Presbyterian the salient phe- 
nomenon of this wobbling and nefarious world, and 
the pursuit and chastisement of sinners the one 
avocation that is permanently worth while. The 
product of that simple doctrine is a character of no 
little vigour and austerity, and one much esteemed 
by the great masses of men, who are always un- 
easily conscious of their own weakness in the face 
of temptation and thus have a sneaking veneration 
for the man apparently firm, and who are always 
ready to believe, furthermore, that any man who 
[52] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

seems to be having a pleasant time is a rascal and 
deserving of the fire. 

The Presbyterian likewise harbours this latter 
suspicion. More, he commonly erects it into a 
certainty. Every single human act, he holds, must 
be either right or wrong — and the overwhelming 
majority of them are wrong. He knows exactly 
what these wrong ones are; he recognizes them in- 
stantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired in- 
tuition; and he believes that they should all be 
punished automatically and with the utmost 
severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian 
overlooking a fault, or pleading for mercy for the 
erring. He would regard such an act as the weak- 
ness of one ridden by the Devil. From such harsh 
judgments and retributions, it must be added in 
fairness, he does not except himself. He detects 
his own aberration almost as quickly as he detects 
the aberration of the other fellow, and though he 
may sometimes seek — being, after all, only human 
— to escape its consequences, he by no means con- 
dones it. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the mental 
anguish of a Presbyterian who has been betrayed, 
by the foul arts of some lascivious wench, into any 
form of adultery, or, by the treason of his senses 

[53] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

in some other way, into a voluptuous yielding to 
the lure of the other beaux arts. It has been our 
fortune, at various times, to be in the confidence 
of Presbyterians thus seduced from their native 
virtue, and we bear willing testimony to their sin- 
cere horror. Even the least pious of them was as 
greatly shaken up by what to us, on our lower plane, 
seemed a mere peccadillo, perhaps in bad taste 
but certainly not worth getting into a sweat about, 
as we ourselves would have been by a gross breach 
of faith. 

But, as has been before remarked, the bitter 
must go with the sweet. In the face of so ex- 
alted a moral passion it would be absurd to look for 
that urbane habit which seeks the well-being of 
one's self and the other fellow, not in exact 
obedience to harsh statutes, but in ease, dignity and 
the more delicate sort of self-respect. That is to 
say, it would be absurd to ask a thoroughly moral 
man to be also a man of honour. The two, in fact, 
are eternal enemies; their endless struggle achieves 
that happy mean of philosophies which we call 
civilization. The man of morals keeps order in 
the world, regimenting its lawless hordes and organ- 
izing its governments; the man of honour mellows 

[54] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

and embellishes what is thus achieved, giving to 
duty the aspect of a privilege and making human in- 
tercourse a thing of fine faiths and understandings. 
We trust the former to do what is righteous; we 
trust the latter to do what is seemly. It is seldom 
that a man can do both. The man of honour in- 
evitably exalts the punctilio above the law of God; 
one may trust him, if he has eaten one's salt, to re- 
spect one's daughter as he would his own, but if he 
happens to be under no such special obligation it 
may be hazardous to trust him with even one's 
charwoman or one's mother-in-law. And the man 
of morals, confronted by a moral situation, is 
usually wholly without honour. Put him on the 
stand to testify against a woman, and he will tell 
all he knows about her, even including what he has 
learned in the purple privacy of her boudoir. 
More, he will not tell it reluctantly, shame-facedly, 
apologetically, but proudly and willingly, in re- 
sponse to his high sense of moral duty. It is 
simply impossible for such a man to lie like a 
gentleman. He lies, of course, like all of us, and 
perhaps more often than most of us on the other 
side, but he does it, not to protect sinners from the 
moral law, but to make their punishment under the 

[55] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

moral law more certain, swift, facile and spec- 
tacular. 

By this long route we get at our apologia for Dr. 
Wilson, a man from whom we both differ in politics, 
in theology, in ethics and in epistemology, but one 
whose great gifts, particularly for moral endeavour 
in the grand manner, excite our sincere admiration. 
Both his foes and his friends, it seems to us, -do 
him a good deal of injustice. The former, carried 
away by that sense of unlikeness which lies at the 
bottom of most of the prejudices of uncritical men, 
denounce him out of hand because he is not as 
they are. A good many of these foes, of course, 
are not actually men of honour themselves; some 
of them, in fact, belong to sects and professions — 
for example, that of intellectual Socialist and that 
of member of Congress — in which no authentic man 
of honour could imaginably have a place. But it 
may be accurately said of them, nevertheless, that 
if actual honour is not in them, then at least they 
have something of tlie manner of honour — that they 
are moving in the direction of honour, though not 
yet arrived. Few men, indeed, may be said to be- 
long certainly and irrevocably in either category, 
that of the men of honour or that of the men of 

[56] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

morals. Dr. Wilson, perhaps, is one such man. 
He is as palpably and exclusively a man of morals 
as, say, George Washington was a man of honour. 
He is, in the one category, a great beacon, burning 
almost blindingly; he is, in the other, no more than 
a tallow dip, guttering asthmatically. But the ma- 
jority of men occupy a sort of twilight zone, and 
the most that may be said of them is that their faces 
turn this way or that. Such is the case with Dr. 
Wilson's chief foes. Their eyes are upon honour, 
as upon some new and superlatively sweet enchant- 
ment, and, bemused to starboard, they view the 
scene to port with somewhat extravagant bilious- 
ness. Thus, when they contemplate His Excel- 
lency's long and perhaps unmatchable series of 
violations of his troth — in the matter of "keeping 
us out of the war," in the matter of his solemn prom- 
ises to China, in the matter of his statement of war 
aims and purposes, in the matter of his shifty deal- 
ing with the Russian question, in the Ynatter of his 
repudiation of the armistice terms offered to the 
Germans, in the matter of his stupendous lying to 
the Senate committee on foreign relations, and so 
on, ad infinitum — when they contemplate all that 
series of evasions, dodgings, hypocrisies, double- 

[57] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

dealings and plain mendacities, they succumb to 
an indignation that is still more than half moral, 
and denounce him bitterly as a Pecksniff, a Tar- 
tuffe and a Pinto. In tliat judgment, as we shall 
show, tliere is naught save a stupid incapacity to 
understand an unlike man — in brief, no more than 
tlie dunderheadedness which makes a German re- 
gard even' Englishman as a snuffling poltroon, hid- 
ing behind his vassals, and causes an Englishman 
to look upon even' German as a fiend in human 
form, up to his hips in blood. 

But one expects a man's foes to misjudge him, 
and even to libel him deliberately; a good deal of 
their enmity, in fact, is often no more than a product 
of tlieir uneasy consciousness that they have dealt 
unfairly with him; one is always most bitter, not 
toward tlie author of one's wrongs, but toward the 
victim of one's wrongs. Unluckily, Dr. Wilson's 
friends have had at him even more cruelly. 
When, seeking to defend what tliey regard as his 
honour, diey account for his incessant violation of 
his pledges — to the voters in 1916, to the soldiers 
drafted for the war, to the Chinese on their en- 
trance, to tlie Austrians w^hen he sought to get them 
out, to the Germans when he offered them his four- 

[58] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

teen points, to the country in the matter of secret 
diplomacy — when his friends attempt to explain his 
cavalier repudiation of all these pledges on the 
ground that he could not have kept them without 
violating later pledges, they achieve, of course, only 
an imbecility, obvious and damning, for it must be 
plain that no man is permitted, in honour, to make 
antagonistic engagements, or to urge his private 
tranquillity or even the public welfare as an excuse 
for changing their terms without the consent of the 
parties of the second part. A man of honour is 
one who simply does whatever he says he will do, 
provided the other party holds to the compact too. 
One cannot imagine him shifting, trimming and 
making excuses; it is his peculiar mark that he 
never makes excuses — that the need of making them 
would fill him with unbearable humiliation. The 
moment a man of honour faces the question of his 
honour, he is done for; it can no more stand in- 
vestigation than the chastity of a woman can stand 
investigation. In such a character, Dr. Wilson 
would have been bound irrevocably by all his long 
series of solemn engagements, from the first to the 
last, without the slightest possibility of dotting an i 
or of cutting off the tail of a comma. It would have 

[59] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

been as impossible for him to have repudiated a 
single one of them at the desire of his friends or in 
tlie interest of his idealistic enterprises as it would 
have been for him to have repudiated it to his o\vii 
private profit. 

But here is where both foes and friends go 
aground; botli attempt to inject concepts of honour 
into transactions predominatingly, and perhaps ex- 
clusively, coloured by concepts of morals. The 
two tilings are quite distinct, as the two sorts of 
men are quite distinct. Beside the obligation of 
honour there is tlie obligation of morals, entirely 
independent and often directly antagonistic. And 
beside the man who yields to the punctilio — the 
man of honour, tlie man who keeps his w^ord — tliere 
is the man who submits himself, regardless of his 
personal engagements and die penalties tliat go 
therewitli, to the clarion call of the moral law. 
Dr. \^'ilson is sucli a man. He is, as has been re- 
marked, a Presbyterian, a Calvinist, a militant 
moralist. In tliat role, devoted to tliat high cause, 
clad in that white garment, he was purged of all 
obligations of honour to any merely eartlily power. 
His one obligation was to the moral law — in brief, 
to tlie ordinance of God, as determined by Chris- 

[60] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

tian pastors. Under that moral law, specifically, 
he was charged to search out and determine its vio- 
lations by the accused in the dock, to wit, by the 
German nation, according to the teaching of those 
pastors and tlie light within, and to fix and exe- 
cute a punishment that should be swift, terrible and 
overwhelming. 

To this business, it must be granted by even his 
most extravagant opponents, he addressed himself 
with the loftiest resolution and singleness of pur- 
pose, excluding all puerile questions of ways and 
means. He was, by the moral law, no more bound 
to take into account the process whereby the ac- 
cused was brought to book and the weight of retri- 
bution brought to bear than a detective is bound to 
remember how any ordinary prisoner is snared for 
the mill of justice. The detective himself may 
have been an important factor in that process; he 
may have taken the prisoner by some stratagem in- 
volving the most gross false pretences ; he may have 
even played the agent provocateur and so actually 
suggested, planned and supervised the crime. But 
surely that would be a ridiculous critic who would 
argue thereby that the detective should forthwith 
forget the law violated and the punishment justly 

[61] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

provided for it, and go over to the side of the de- 
fence on the ground that his dealings with the 
prisoner involved him in obligations of honour. 
The world would laugh at such a moral moron, if it 
did not actually destroy him as an enemy of so- 
ciety. It recognizes the two codes that we have 
described, and it knows that they are antagonistic. 
It expects a man sworn to the service of morality 
to discharge his duty at any cost to his honour, just 
as it expects a man publicly devoted to honour to 
keep his word at any cost to his or to the public 
morals. Moreover, it inclines, when there is a 
conflict, toward the side of morals; the overwhelm- 
ing majority of men are men of morals, not men 
of honour. They believe that it is vastly more im- 
portant that the guilty should be detected, taken 
into custody and exposed to the rigour of the law 
than that the honour of this or that man should be 
preserved. In truth, there are frequent circum- 
stances under which they positively esteem a man 
who thus sacrifices his honour, or even their own 
honour. The man of c^i^honour may actually take 
on the character of a public hero. Thus, in 1903, 
when the late Major General Roosevelt, then Presi- 
dent, tore up the treaty of 1846, whereby the United 

[62] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

States guaranteed the sovereignty of Columbia in 
the Isthmus of Panama, the great masses of the 
American plain people not only at once condoned 
this grave breach of honour, but actually applauded 
Dr. Roosevelt because his act furthered the great 
moral enterprise of digging the canal. 

These distinctions, of course, are familiar to all 
men who devote themselves to the study of the 
human psyche; that morals and honour are not one 
and the same thing, but two very distinct and even 
antithetical things, is surely no news to the ju- 
dicious. But what is thus merely an axiom of 
ethics, politics or psychology is often kept strangely 
secret in the United States. We have acquired the 
habit of evading all the facts of life save those that 
are most superficial; by long disuse we have almost 
lost the capacity for thinking analytically and ac- 
curately. A thing may be universally known 
among us, and yet never get itself so much as men- 
tioned. Around scores of elementary platitudes 
there hangs a shuddering silence as complete as that 
which hedges in the sacred name of a Polynesian 
chief. At every election time, in our large cities, 
most of the fundamental issues are concealed, par- 
ticularly when they happen to take on a theological 

[63] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

colour, which is very often. It is, for example, 
the timorous public theory, bom of this fear of the 
forthright fact, that when a man sets up as a candi- 
date for, say, a judgeship, the question of his priv- 
ate religious faith is of no practical importance — 
that it makes no difference whether he is a Catholic 
or a Methodist. The truth is, of course, that his 
faith is often of the very first importance — that 
it will colour his conduct of the forensic combats be- 
fore him even more than his politics, his capacity 
to digest proteids or the social aspirations of his 
wife. One constantly notes, in American jurispru- 
dence, the effects of theological prejudices on the 
bench; there are at least a dozen controlling de- 
cisions, covering especially the new moral legisla- 
tion, which might almost be mistaken by a layman 
for sermons by the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. The 
Prohibitionists, during their long and very adroit 
campaign, shrewdly recognized the importance of 
controlling the judiciary; in particular, they threw 
all their power against the election of candidates 
who were known to be Catholics, or Jews, or free- 
thinkers. As a result they packed the bench of 
nearly every state with Methodist, Baptist and Pres- 
byterian judges, and these gentlemen at once up- 

[64] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

held all their maze of outrageous statutes. That 
they would do so if elected was known in advance, 
and yet, so far as the record shows, it was a rare 
thing for any one to attack them on the ground of 
their religion, and rarer still for any such attack 
to influence many votes. The taboo was working. 
The majority of voters were eager to avoid that 
issue. They felt, in some vague and unintelligible 
way, that it was improper to raise it. 

So with all other primary issues. There is 
surely no country in the world in which the mar- 
riage relation is discussed more copiously than in 
the United States, and yet there is no country in 
which its essentials are more diligently avoided. 
Some years ago, seeking to let some sagacity into 
the prevailing exchange of platitudes, one of us 
wrote a book upon the subject, grounding it upon 
the obvious doctrine that women have much more 
to gain by marriage than men, and that the major- 
ity of men are aware of it, and would never marry 
at all if it were not for women's relentless effort to 
bring them to it. This banality the writer sup- 
ported, by dint of great painstaking, in a somewhat 
novel way. That is to say, he put upon himself the 
limitation of employing no theory, statement of fact 

[65] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

or argument in the book that was not already em- 
bodied in a common proverb in some civilized lan- 
guage. Now and then it was a bit hard to find the 
proverb, but in most cases it was very easy, and in 
some cases he found, not one, but dozens. Well, 
this laborious pastiche of the obvious made such a 
sensation that it sold better than any other book that 
the author had ever written — and the reviews unani- 
mously described it, either with praise or with 
blame, as an extraordinary collection of heresies, 
most of them almost too acrid to be bruited about. 
In other words, this mass of platitudes took Ameri- 
cans by surprise, and somehow shocked them. 
What was commonplace to even the peasants of the 
European Continent was so unfamiliar to even the 
literate minority over here that the book acquired a 
sort of sinister repute, and the writer himself came 
to be discussed as a fellow with the habit of arising 
in decorous society and indelicately blowing his 
nose. 

There is, of course, something of the same shrink- 
ing from the elemental facts of life in England; it 
seems to run with the Anglo-Saxon. This accounts 
for the shuddering attitude of the English to such 
platitude-monging foreigners as George Bernard 

[66] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

Shaw, the Scotsman disguised as an Irishman, and 
G. K. Chesterton, who shows all the physical and 
mental stigmata of a Bavarian. Shaw's plays, 
which once had all England by the ears, were set 
down as compendiums of the self-evident by the 
French, a realistic and plain-spoken people, and 
were sniffed at in Germany by all save the middle 
classes, who correspond to the intelligentsia of 
Anglo-Saxondom. But in America, even more than 
in England, they were viewed as genuinely satanic. 
We shall never forget, indeed, the tremulous man- 
ner in which American audiences first listened to 
the feeble rattling of the palpable in such pieces as 
"Man and Superman" and "You Never Can Tell." 
It was precisely the manner of an old maid devour- 
ing "What Every Girl of Forty-Five Should Know" 
behind the door. As for Chesterton, his banal ar- 
guments in favour of alcohol shocked the country 
so greatly that his previous high services to relig- 
ious superstition were forgotten, and today he is 
seldom mentioned by respectable Americans. 



It is necessary to repeat that we rehearse all these 
facts, not in indignation, nor indeed in any spirit 

[67] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

of carping whatever, but in perfect serenity and 
simply as descriptive sociologists. This attitude of 
mind is but little comprehended in America, where 
the emotions dominate all human reactions, and 
even such dismal sciences as paleontology, pathol- 
ogy and comparative philology are gaudily col- 
oured by patriotic and other passions. The typi- 
cal American learned man suffers horribly from 
the national disease: he is eternally afraid of some- 
thing. If it is not that some cheese-monger among 
his trustees will have him cashiered for receiving a 
picture post-card from Prof. Dr. Scott Nearing, it 
is that some sweating and scoundrelly German or 
Frenchman will discover and denounce his cribs, 
and if it is not that the foreigner will have at him, 
it is that he will be robbed of his step from asso- 
ciate to full professor by some rival whose wife 
is more amiable to the president of the university, 
or who is himself more popular with the college 
athletes. Thus surrounded by fears, he translates 
them, by a familiar psychological process, into in- 
dignations. He announces what he has to say in 
terms of raucous dudgeon, as a negro, having to 
go past a medical college at night, intones some bel- 
licose gospel-hymn. He is, in brief, vociferously 

[68] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

correct. During the late war, at a time of unusual 
suspicions and hence of unusual hazards, this eager- 
ness to prove orthodoxy by choler was copiously 
on exhibition. Thus one of the leading American 
zoologists printed a work in which, after starting 
off by denouncing the German naming of new 
species as ignorant, dishonest and against God, he 
gradually worked himself up to the doctrine that 
any American who put a tooth into a slab of 
Rinderbrust mit Meerreuig, or peeped at Simplicis- 
simus with the blinds down, or bought his children 
German-made jumping-jacks, was a traitor to the 
Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelm- 
strasse. And thus there were American patholo- 
gists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr. 
Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by 
the Krupps to poison Americans, and who displayed 
their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr. Robert 
Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation 
to him from their monographs. And finally there 
was the posse of "two thousand American Histor- 
ians" assembled by Mr. Creel to instruct the plain 
people in the new theory of American history, 
whereby the Revolution was represented as a la- 
mentable row in an otherwise happy family, delib- 

[69] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

erately instigated by German intrigue — a posse 
which reached its greatest height of correct indig- 
nation in its approval of the celebrated Sisson docu- 
ments, to the obscene delight of the British au- 
thors thereof. 

As we say, we are devoid of all such lofty pas- 
sions, and hence must present our observations in 
the flat, unimaginative, imemotional manner of a 
dentist pulling a tooth. It would not be going too 
far, in fact, to call us emotional idiots. What ails 
us is a constitutional suspicion that the other fel- 
low, after all, may be right, or, in any event, partly 
right. In the present case we by no means repre- 
hend the avoidance of issues that we have de- 
scribed; we merely record it. The fact is that it 
has certain very obvious uses, and is probably in- 
evitable in a democratic society. It is commonly 
argued that free speech is necessary to the pros- 
perity of a democracy, but in this doctrine we take 
no stock. On the contrary, there are plain rea- 
sons for holding that free speech is more dangerous 
to a democracy than to any other form of govern- 
ment, and no doubt these reasons, if only uncon- 
sciously, were at the bottom of the extraordinary 
body of repressive legislation put upon the books 

[70] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

during the late war. The essential thing about a 
democracy is that the men at the head of the state 
are wholly dependent, for a continuance of their 
power, upon the good opinion of the popular ma- 
jority. While they are actually in office, true 
enough, they are theoretically almost completely 
irresponsible, but their terms of office are usually 
so short that they must give constant thought to 
the imminent canvassing of their acts, and this 
threat of being judged and turned out commonly 
greatly conditions their exercise of their power, 
even while they hold it to the full. Of late, in- 
deed, there has actually arisen the doctrine that 
they are responsible at all times and must respond 
to every shift in public sentiment, regardless of 
their own inclinations, and there has even grown up 
the custom of subjecting them to formal discipline, 
as by what is called the recall. The net result is 
that a public officer under a democracy is bound to 
regard the popular will during the whole of his 
term in office, and cannot hope to carry out any 
intelligible plan of his own if the mob has been set 
against it. 

Now, the trouble with this scheme is that the 
mob reaches its conclusions, not by logical steps 

[71] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

but by emotional steps, and that its information 
upon all save a very small minority of the questions 
publicly at issue is always scant and inaccurate. 
It is thus constantly liable to inflammation by adroit 
demagogues, or rabble-rousers, and inasmuch as 
these rabble-rousers are animated as a sole motive 
by the hope of turning out the existing officers of 
state and getting the offices for themselves, the 
man in office must inevitably regard them as his 
enemies and the doctrines they preach as subver- 
sive of good government. This view is not alto- 
gether selfish. There is, in fact, sound logic in it, 
for it is a peculiarity of the mob mind that it always 
takes in most hospitably what is intrinsically most 
idiotic — that between two antagonistic leaders it 
always follows the one who is longest on vague and 
brilliant words and shortest on sense. Thus the 
man in office, if he would be free to carry on his 
duties in anything approaching freedom and com- 
fort, must adopt measures against that tendency to 
run amuck. 

Three devices at once present themselves. One 
is to take steps against the rabble-rousers by seek- 
ing to make it appear that they are traitors, and 
so arousing the mob against them — in brief, to 

[72] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

deny them their constitutional right to free speech 
under colour of criminal statutes. The second is 
to combine this plan with that of flooding the coun- 
try with official news by a corps of press-agents, 
chautauquans and other such professors of decep- 
tion. The third is to meet the rabble-rousers on 
their own ground, matching their appeals to the 
emotions with appeals even more powerful, and out- 
doing their vague and soothing words with words 
even more vague and soothing. All three plans 
have been in operation since the first days of the 
republic; the early Federalists employed the first 
two with such assiduity that the mob of that time 
finally revolted. All three were brought to the 
highest conceivable point of perfection by the late 
Dr. Wilson, a man whose resolute fidelity to his 
moral ideas was matched only by his magnificent 
skill at playing upon every prejudice and weakness 
of the plain people. 

But men of such exalted and varied gifts are not 
common. The average head of a democratic state 
is not ipso facto the best rabble-rouser within that 
state, but merely one of the best. He may be able, 
on fair terms, to meet any individual rival, but it 
is rare for him to be able to meet the whole pack, 

[73] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

or even any considerable group. To relieve him 
from that difficulty, and so prevent the incessant 
running amuck of the populace, it is necessar}' to 
handicap all tlie remaining rabble-rousers, and this 
is most effectively done by limitations upon free 
speech which originate as statutes and gradually 
take on the form and potency of national customs. 
Such limitations arose in the United States by pre- 
cisely tliat process. Tliey began in the first years 
of the republic as definite laws. Some of tliose 
laws were aftenvard abandoned, but what was fun- 
damentally sound in diem remained in force as 
custom. 

It must be obvious that even Dr. Wilson, despite 
his tremendous gift for the third of the devices that 
we have named, would have been in sore case dur- 
ing his second administration if it had not been 
for his employment of the other tsvo. Imagine the 
United States during tiie Summer of 1917 widi ab- 
solute free speech the order of the day! The 
mails would have been flooded with Socialist and 
pacifist documents, every street-comer would have 
had its screaming soap-box orator, the newspapers 
would have shaken tlie ver>' heavens witli colossal 
alarms, and conscientious objection would have 
[74] 



k 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

taken on the proportions of a national frenzy. In 
the face of such an avalanche of fears and balder- 
dash, there would have been no work at all for the 
German propagandists; in fact, it is likely that a 
great many of them, under suspicion on account of 
their relative moderation, would have been lynched 
as agents of the American munitions patriots. For 
the mob, it must be remembered, infallibly in- 
clines, not to the side of the soundest logic and 
loftiest purpose, but to the side of the loudest noise, 
and without the artificial aid of a large and com- 
plex organization of press-agents and the power to 
jail any especially effective opponent forthwith, 
even a President of the United States would be un- 
able to bawl down the whole fraternity. That it is 
matter of the utmost importance, in time of war, to 
avoid any such internal reign of terror must be 
obvious to even the most fanatical advocate of free 
speech. There must be, in such emergencies, a 
resolute pursuit of coherent policies, and that would 
be obviously impossible with the populace turning 
distractedly to one bogus messiah after another, and 
always seeking to force its latest craze upon the 
government. Thus, while one may perchance drop 
a tear or two upon the Socialists jailed by a sort of 

[75] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

lynch law for trying to exercise their plain con- 
stitutional rights, and upon the pacifists tarred and 
feathered by mobs led by government agents, and 
upon the conscientious objectors starved and 
clubbed to death in military dungeons, it must still 
be plain that such barbarous penalties were essen- 
tially necessary. The victims, in the main, were 
half-wits suffering from the martyr complex; it 
was their admitted desire to sacrifice themselves for 
the Larger Good. This desire was gratified — not 
in the way they hoped for, of course, but never- 
theless in a way that must have given any impartial 
observer a feeling of profound, if discreditable, 
satisfaction. 

What a republic has to fear especially is the 
rabble-rouser who advocates giving an objective 
reality to the gaudy theories which lie at the founda- 
tions of the prevailing scheme of government. He 
is far more dangerous than a genuine revolutionist, 
for the latter comes with ideas that are actually new, 
or, at all events, new to the mob, and so he has to 
overcome its congenital hostility to novelty. But 
the reformer who, under a democracy, bases his 
case upon the principles upon which democracy is 
founded has an easy road, for the populace is 

[76] 



I 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

lamiliar with those principles and eager to see 
them put into practical effect. The late Cecil 
Chesterton, in his penetrating "History of the 
United States," showed how Andrew Jackson came 
to power by that route. Jackson, he said, was 
simply a man so naive that he accepted the lofty 
doctrines of the Declaration of Independence with- 
out any critical questioning whatever, and "really 
acted as if they were true." The appearance of 
such a man, he goes on, was "appalling" to the 
political aristocrats of 1825. They themselves, of 
course, enunciated those doctrines daily and based 
I their whole politics upon them — but not to the point 
( of really executing them. So when Jackson came 
, down from the mountains with the same sonorous 
I words upon his lips, but with the addition of a 
i solemn promise to carry them out — when he thus 
* descended upon them, he stole their thunder and 
spiked their guns, and after a brief struggle he had 
I disposed of them. The Socialists, free-speech 
. fanatics, anti-conscriptionists, anti-militarists and 
I other such democratic maximalists of 1917 and 
' 1918 were, in essence, nothing but a new and for- 
i midable horde of Jacksons. Their case rested 
j upon principles held to be true by all good Ameri- 

[77] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

cans, and constantly reaffirmed by the highest 
officers of state. It was thus extremely likely that, 
if they were permitted to woo the public ear, they 
would quickly amass a majority of suffrages, and so 
get the conduct of things into their own hands. So 
it became necessary, in order that the great enter- 
prises then under way might be pushed to a suc- 
cessful issue, that all these marplots be silenced, 
and it was accordingly done. This proceeding, of 
course, was theoretically violative of their com- 
mon rights, and hence theoretically un-American. 
All the theory, in fact, was on the side of the vic- 
tims. But war time is no time for theories, and a 
man with war powers in his hands is not one to 
parley with them. 

As we have said, the menace presented by such 
unintelligent literalists is probably a good deal 
more dangerous to a democracy than to a govern- 
ment of any other form. Under an aristocracy, 
for example, such as prevailed, in one form or 
anotlier, in England, Germany, Italy and France 
before the war, it is possible to give doctrinaires a 
relatively free rein, for even if they succeed in con- 
verting the mob to their whim-wham, there remain 
insuperable impediments to its adoption and execu- 

[78] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

tion as law. In England, as every one knows, the 
impediment was a ruling caste highly skilled in 
the governmental function and generally trusted by 
a majority of the populace — a ruling caste firmly 
intrenched in the House of Lords and scarcely less 
powerful in the House of Commons. In France it 
was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and 
custom that nothing short of a political cataclysm 
could shake it. In Germany and Italy it was an 
aristocracy buttressed by laws cunningly designed 
to nullify the numerical superiority of the mob, and 
by a monarchical theory that set up a heavy counter- 
weight to public opinion. 

In the face of such adroit checks and balances 
it is a matter of relative indifference whether the 
mob blows scalding hot or freezing cold. What- 
ever the extravagance of its crazes, there remains 
effective machinery for holding them in check until 
they spend themselves, which is usually soon 
enough. Thus the English government, though 
theoretically as much opposed to anarchists as the 
American government, gave them cheerful asylum 
before the war and permitted them to preach their 
lamentable notions almost without check, whereas 
in America they early aroused great fears and 

[79] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

were presently put under such disabilities that their 
propaganda became almost impossible. Even in 
France, where they had many converts and were 
frequently in eruption, there was far more hospi- 
tality to them than in the United States. And thus 
in the Germany of Bismarck's day, the Socialists, 
after a brief and aberrant attempt to suppress them, 
were allowed to run free, despite the fact that their 
doctrine was quite as abhorrent to German official 
doctrine as anarchism was to American official doc- 
trine. The German ruling caste of tliose days was 
sheltered behind laws and customs which enabled 
it to pull the teeth of Socialism, even in the face of 
enormous Socialist majorities. But under a de- 
mocracy it is difficult, and often downright impos- 
sible, to oppose the popular craze of the moment 
with any effect, and so there must be artificial means 
of disciplining the jake-fetchers who seek to set 
such enthusiasms in motion. The shivering fear 
of Bolshevism, visible of late among the capitalists 
of America, is based upon a real danger. These 
capitalists have passed through the burning fires 
of Rooseveltian trust-busting and Bryanistic pop- 
ulism, and they know very well that half a dozen 
Lenines and Trotskis, turned loose upon the plain 

[80] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

people, would quickly recruit a majority of them 
for a holy war upon capital, and that they have the 
political power to make such a holy war devastating. 
The amateur of popular psychology may wonder 
why it is that the mob, in the face of the repressions 
constantly practised in the United States, does not 
occasionally rise in revolt, and so get back its right 
to be wooed and ravished by all sorts of mounte- 
banks. Theoretically it has that right, and what 
is more, it has the means of regaining it; nothing 
could resist it if it made absolute free speech an 
issue in a national campaign and voted for the 
candidate advocating it. But something is over- 
looked here, and that is the fact that the mob has 
no liking for free speech per se. Some of the 
grounds of its animosity we have rehearsed. 
Others are not far to seek. One of them lies in the 
mob's chronic suspicion of all advocates of ideas, 
bom of its distaste for ideas themselves. The mob- 
man cannot imagine himself throwing up his job 
and deserting his home, his lodge and his speak- 
easy to carry a new gospel to his fellows, and so he 
is inclined to examine the motives of any other man 
who does so. The one motive that is intelligible to 
him is the desire for profit, and he commonly con- 

[81] 



THE AMERICAN CRlEDO 

eludes at once that this is what moves the prop- 
agandist before him. His reasoning is defective, 
but his conclusion is usually not far from right. 
In point of fact, idealism is not a passion in 
America, but a trade; all the salient idealists make 
a living at it, and some of them, for example. Dr. 
Bryan and the Rev. Dr. Sunday, are commonly be- 
lieved to have amassed large fortunes. For an 
American to advocate a cause without any hope of 
private usufruct is almost unheard of; it would be 
difficult to find such a man who was not plainly in- 
sane. The most eloquent and impassioned of 
American idealists are candidates for public office; 
on the lower levels idealism is no more than a hand- 
maiden of business, like advertising or belonging 
to the Men and Religion Forward Movement. 

Another and very important cause of the pro- 
letarian's failure to whoop for free speech is to be 
found in his barbarous delight in persecution, re- 
gardless of the merits of the cause. The spectacle 
of a man exercising the right of free speech yields, 
intrinsically, no joy, for there is seldom anything 
dramatic about it. But the spectacle of a man 
being mobbed, jailed, beaten and perhaps murdered 
for trying to exercise it is a good show like any 
[82] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

other good show, and the populace is thus not only- 
eager to witness it but even willing to help it along. 
It is therefore quite easy to set the mob upon, say, 
the Bolsheviki, despite the fact that the Bolsheviki 
have the professed aim of doing the mob an incom- 
parable service. During the war-time jinks of the 
Postoffice and the Department of Justice, popular 
opinion was always on the side of the raiding 
parties. It applauded every descent upon a So- 
cialist or pacifist meeting, not because it was very 
hotly in favour of war — in fact, it was lukewarm 
about war, and resisted all efforts to heat it up until 
overwhelming swarms of yokel-yankers were turned 
upon it — but because it was in favour of a safe and 
stimulating form of rough-house, with the police 
helping instead of hindering. It never stopped to 
inquire about the merits of the matter. All it asked 
for was a melodramatic raid, followed by a noisy 
trial of the accused in the newspapers, and the daily 
publication of sensational (and usually bogus) 
evidence about the discovery of compromising lit- 
erature in his wife's stockings, including records of 
his receipt of $100,000 from von Bernstorff, Car- 
ranza or some other transient hobgoblin. The cele- 
brated O'Leary trial was typical. After months of 

[83] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

blood-curdling charges in the press, it turned out 
when the accused got before a court that the ev- 
idence against him, on which it was sought to con- 
vict him of a capital offence, was so feeble that it 
would have scarcely sufficed to convict him of an 
ordinary misdemeanor, and that most of this feeble 
testimony was palpably perjured. Nevertheless, 
public opinion was nearly unanimously against him 
from first to last, and the jury which acquitted him 
was almost apologetic about its inability to give the 
populace the crowning happiness of a state hanging. 
Under cover of the war, of course, the business 
of providing such shows prospered extraordinarily, 
but it is very active even in time of peace. The sur- 
est way to get on in politics in America is to play the 
leading part in a prosecution which attracts public 
notice. The list of statesmen who have risen in 
that fashion includes the names of many of the 
highest dignity, e. g., Hughes, Folk, Whitman, 
Heney, Baker and Palmer. Every district attorney 
in America prays nightly that God will deliver 
into his hands some Thaw, or Becker, or O'Leary, 
that he may get upon the front pages and so become 
a governor, a United States senator, or a justice of 
the Supreme Court of the United States. The late 

[84] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

crusade against W. R. Hearst, which appeared to 
the public as a great patriotic movement, was actu- 
ally chiefly managed by a subordinate prosecuting 
officer who hoped to get high office out of it. 

This last aspirant failed in his enterprise largely 
because he had tackled a man who was himself of 
superb talents as a rouser of the proletariat, but 
nine times out of ten the thing succeeds. Its suc- 
cess is due almost entirely to the factor that we 
have mentioned, to wit, to the circumstance that the 
sympathy of the public is always on the side of the 
prosecution. This sympathy goes so far that it 
is ready to condone the most outrageous conduct 
in judges and prosecuting officers, providing only 
they give good shows. During the late war upon 
Socialists, pacifists, anti-conscriptionists and other 
such heretics, judges theoretically employed to in- 
sure fair trials engaged in the most amazing at- 
tacks upon prisoners before them, denouncing them 
without hearing them, shutting out evidence on 
their side and making stump speeches to the jury 
against them. That conduct aroused no public in- 
dignation; on the contrary, such judges were fre- 
quently praised in the newspapers and a good many 
of them were promoted to higher courts. Even in 

[85] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

time of peace there is no general antipathy to that 
sort of thing. At least two-thirds of our judges, 
federal, state and municipal, colour their decisions 
with the newspaper gabble of the moment; even the 
Supreme Court has shown itself delicately respon- 
sive to the successive manias of the Uplift, which is, 
at bottom, no more than an organized scheme for in- 
venting new crimes and making noisy pursuit of 
new categories of criminals. Some time ago an 
intelligent Mexican, after studying our courts, told 
us that he was surprised that, in a land ostensibly of 
liberty, so few of the notorious newspaper-wooers 
and blacklegs upon the bench were assassinated. 
It is, in fact, rather curious. The thing happens 
very seldom, and then it is usually in the South, 
where the motive is not altruistic but political. 
That is to say, the assassin merely desires to remove 
one blackleg in order to make a place for some other 
blackleg. He has no objection to systematized in- 
justice; all he desires is that it be dispensed in 
favour of his own side. 

VI 

The mob delight in melodramatic and cruel 
spectacles, thus constantly fed and fostered by the 

[86] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

judicial arm in the United States, is also at the 
bottom of another familiar American phenomenon, 
to wit, lynching. A good part of the enormous 
literature of lynching is devoted to a discussion of 
its causes, but most of that discussion is ignorant 
and some of it is deliberately mendacious. The 
majority of Southern commentators argue that the 
motive of the lynchers is a laudable yearning to 
"protect Southern womanhood," despite the plain 
fact that only a very small proportion of the black- 
amoors hanged and burned are even so much as 
accused of molesting Southern womanhood. On 
the other hand, some of the negro intellectuals of 
the North ascribe the recurrent butcheries to the 
Southern white man's economic jealousy of the 
Southern black, who is fast acquiring property and 
reaching out for the prerogatives that go therewith. 
Finally, certain white Northerners seek a cause in 
mere political animosity, arguing that the Southern 
white hates the negro because the latter is his the- 
oretical equal at the polls, though actually not per- 
mitted to vote. 

All of these notions seem to us to be fanciful. 
Lynching is popular in the South simply because 
the Southern populace, like any other populace, 

[87] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

delights in thrilling shows, and hecause no other 
sort of show is provided by the backward culture of 
the region. The introduction of prize-fighting 
down there, or baseball on a large scale, or amuse- 
ment places like Coney Island, or amateur athletic 
contests, or picnics like those held by the more 
truculent Irish fraternal organizations, or any other 
such wholesale devices for shocking and diverting 
the proletariat would undoubtedly cause a great de- 
cline in lynching. The art is practised, in the 
overwhelming main, in remote and God-forsaken 
regions, in which the only rival entertainment is 
offered by one-sided political campaigns, third-rate 
chautauquas and Methodist revivals. \^lien it is 
imitated in the North, it is always in some drab 
factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of 
course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but 
these are always economic in origin, and have noth- 
ing to do with lynching, properly so-called. One 
could not imagine an actual lynching at, say, 
Atlantic City, widi ten or fifteen bands playing, 
blind pigs in operation up ever)- alley, a theatre in 
every block or two, and the boardwalk swarming 
with ladies of joy. Even a Mississippian, trans- 
ported to such scenes, succumbs to the atmosphere 

[88] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

of pleasure, and so has no seizures of moral rage 
against the poor darkey. Lynching, in brief, is a 
phenomenon of isolated and stupid communities, 
a mark of imperfect civilization; it follows the 
hookworm and malaria belt; it shows itself in in- 
verse proportion to the number of shoot-the-chutes, 
symphony orchestras, roof gardens, theatres, horse 
races, yellow journals and automatic pianos. No 
one ever heard of a lynching in Paris, at Newport, 
or in London. But there are incessant lynchings 
in the remoter parts of Russia, in the backwoods of 
Serbia, Bulgaria and Herzegovina, in Mexico and 
Nicaragua, and in such barbarous American states 
as Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. 

The notion that lynching in the South is counte- 
nanced by the gentry or that they take an actual 
hand in it is libelous and idiotic. The well-born 
and well-bred Southerner is no more a savage than 
any other man of condition. He may live among 
savages, but that no more makes him a savage than 
an English gentleman is made one by having a place 
in Wales, or a Russian by living on his estate in 
the Ukraine. What Northern observers mistake 
for the gentry of the South, when they report the 
participation of "leading citizens" in a lynching, is 

[89] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

simply the office-holding and commercial bour- 
geoisie — the offspring of the poor white trash who 
skulked at home during the Civil War, robbing the 
widows and orphans of the soldiers at the front, 
and so laying the foundations of the present "in- 
dustrial prosperity" of the section, i. e., its con- 
version from a region of large landed estates and 
urbane life into a region of stinking factories, 
filthy mining and oil towns, child-killing cotton 
mills, vociferous chambers of commerce and other 
such swineries. It is, of course, a fact that the 
average lynching party in Mississippi or Alabama 
is led by the mayor and that the town judge climbs 
down from his bench to give it his official support, 
but it is surely not a fact that these persons are of 
the line of such earlier public functionaries as 
Pickens, Troup and Pettus. On the contrary, they 
correspond to the lesser sort of Tammany office- 
holders and to the vermin who monopolize the pub- 
lic functions in such cities as Boston and Phil- 
adelphia. The gentry, with few exceptions, have 
been forced out of the public service everywhere 
south of the Potomac, if not out of politics. The 
Democratic victory in 1912 flooded all the govern- 
mental posts at Washington with Southerners, and 

[90] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

some of them remain in office to this day, and are 
among the chief functionaries of the nation. 
But in the whole vast corps there are, we believe, 
but ten who would be accepted as gentlemen by 
Southern standards, and only three of these are in 
posts of any importance. In the two houses of 
Congress there is but one. 

It is thus absurd to drag the gentry of the 
South — the Bourbons of New England legend — into 
a discussion of the lynching problem. They 
represent, in fact, what remains of the only genuine 
aristocracy ever visible in the United States, and 
lynching, on the theoretical side, is far too moral 
a matter ever to engage an aristocracy. The true 
lynchers are the plain people, and at the bottom of 
the sport there is nothing more noble than the mob 
man's chronic and ineradicable poltroonery. 
Cruel by nature, delighting in sanguinary spec- 
tacles, and here brought to hatred of the negro by 
the latter's increasing industrial, {not political, 
capitalistic or social) rivalry, he naturally diverts 
himself in his moments of musing with visions of 
what he would do to this or that Moor if he had the 
courage. Unluckily, he hasn't, and so he is unable 
to execute his dream a cappella. If, inflamed by 

[91] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

liquor, he attempts it, the Moor commonly gives 
him a beating, or even murders him. But what 
thus lies beyond his talents as an individual at once 
becomes feasible when he joins himself with other 
men in a like situation. This is the genesis of a 
mob of lynchers. It is composed primarily of a 
few men with definite grievances, sometimes against 
the negro lynched but often against quite different 
negroes. It is composed secondarily of a large 
number of fifth-rate men eager for a thrilling show, 
involving no personal danger. It is composed in 
the third place of a few rabble-rousers and poli- 
ticians, all of them hot to exhibit themselves before 
the populace at a moment of public excitement and 
in an attitude of leadership. It is the second ele- 
ment that gives life to the general impulse. With- 
out its ardent appetite for a rough and shocking 
spectacle there would be no lynching. Its in- 
fluence is plainly shown by the frequent unintelligi- 
bility of the whole proceeding; all its indignation 
over the crime alleged to be punished is an after- 
thought; any crime will answer, once its blood is 
up. Thus the most characteristic lynchings in the 
South are not those in which a confessed criminal 
is done to death for a definite crime, but those in 

[92] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

which, in sheer high spirits, some convenient Afri- 
can is taken at random and lynched, as the news- 
papers say, "on general principles." That sort of 
lynching is the most honest and normal, and we are 
also inclined to think that it is also the most enjoy- 
able, for the other sort brings moral indignation 
with it, and moral indignation is disagreeable. No 
man can be both indignant and happy. 

But here, seeking to throw a feeble beam or two 
of light into the mental processes of the American 
proletarian, we find ourselves entering upon a dis- 
cussion that grows narrow and perhaps also dull. 
Lynching, after all, is not an American institution, 
but a peculiarly Southern institution, and even in 
the South it will die out as other more seemly 
recreations are introduced. It would be quite easy, 
we believe, for any Southern community to get rid 
of it by establishing a good brass band and having 
concerts every evening. It would be even easier to 
get rid of it by borrowing a few professional 
scoundrels from the Department of Justice, having 
them raid the "study" of the local Methodist arch- 
deacon, and forthwith trying him publicly — with 
a candidate for governor as prosecuting officer — for 
seduction under promise of salvation. The trouble 

[93] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

down there is not a special viciousness. The 
Southern poor white, taking him by and large, is 
probably no worse and no better than the anthro- 
poid proletarian of the North. What ails the 
whole region is Philistinism. It has lost its old 
aristocracy of the soil and has not yet developed 
an aristocracy of money. The result is that its 
cultural ideas are set by stupid and unimaginative 
men — Southern equivalents of the retired Iowa 
steer stuffers and grain sharks who pollute Los 
Angeles, American equivalents of the rich English 
nonconformists. These men, though they have 
accumulated wealth, have not yet acquired the ca- 
pacity to enjoy civilized recreations. Worse, most 
of them are still so barbarous that they regard such 
recreations as immoral. The dominating opinion 
of the South is thus against most of the devices that 
would diminish lynching by providing substitutes 
for it. In every Southern town some noisy clown 
of a Methodist or Presbyterian clergyman exercises 
a local tyranny. These men are firmly against all 
the divertissements of more cultured regions. 
They oppose prize-fighting, horse-racing, Sunday 
baseball and games of chance. They are bitter 
prohibitionists. By their incessant vice-crusades 

[94] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

they reduce the romance of sex to furtiveness and 
piggishness. They know nothing of music or the 
drama, and view a public library merely as some- 
thing to be rigorously censored. We are convinced 
that their ignorant moral enthusiasm is largely to 
blame for the prevalence of lynching. No doubt 
they themselves are sneakingly conscious of the 
fact, or at least aware of it subconsciously, for 
lynching is the only public amusement that they 
never denounce. 

Their influence reveals strikingly the readiness 
of the inferior American to accept ready-made 
opinions. He seems to be pathetically eager to be 
told what to think, and he is apparently willing to 
accept any instructor who takes the trouble to tackle 
him. This, also, was brilliantly revealed during 
the late war. The powers which controlled the 
press during that fevered time swayed the populace 
as they pleased. So long as the course of Dr. 
Wilson was satisfactory to them he was depicted as 
a second Lincoln, and the plain people accepted the 
estimate without question. To help reinforce it the 
country was actually flooded with lithographs show- 
ing Lincoln and Wilson wreathed by the same 
branch of laurel, and copies of the print got into 

[95] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

millions of humble homes. But immediately Dr. 
Wilson gave offence to his superiors, he began to 
be depicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this 
judgment promptly displaced the other one in the 
popular mind. The late Major General Roosevelt 
was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. 
A man of mercurial temperament, constantly shift- 
ing his position on all large public questions, he 
alternately gave great joy and great alarm to the 
little group of sagaciously wilful men which exer- 
cises genuine sovereignty over the country, and this 
alternation of emotions showed itself, by way of the 
newspapers and other such bawdy agencies, in the 
vacillation of public opinion. The fundamental 
platitudes of the nation were used both for him and 
against him, and always with immense effect. One 
year he was the last living defender of the liberties 
fought for by the Fathers; the next year he was an 
anarchist. Roosevelt himself was much annoyed 
by this unreliability of the mob. Now and then he 
sought to overcome it by direct appeals, but in the 
long run he was usually beaten. Toward the end 
of his life he resigned himself to a policy of great 
discretion, and so withheld his voice until he was 
sure what hymn was being lined out. 

[96] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

The newspapers and press associations, of course, 
do not impart the official doctrine of the moment in 
terms of forthright instructions ; they get it over, as 
the phrase is, in the form of delicate suggestions, 
most of them under cover of the fundamental plati- 
tudes aforesaid. Their job is not to inspire and 
inform public discussion, but simply to colour it, 
and the task most frequently before them is that of 
giving a patriotic and virtuous appearance to what- 
ever the proletariat is to believe. They do this, of 
course, to the tune of deafening protestations of 
their own honesty and altruism. But there is really 
no such thing as an honest newspaper in America; 
if it were set up tomorrow it would perish within 
a month. Every journal, however rich and power- 
ful, is the trembling slave of higher powers, some 
financial, some religious and some political. It 
faces a multitude of censorships, all of them very 
potent. It is censored by the Postoffice, by the 
Jewish advertisers, by the Catholic Church, by the 
Methodists, by the Prohibitionists, by the banking 
oligarchy of its town, and often by even more 
astounding authorities, including the Sinn Fein. 
Now and then a newspaper makes a valiant gesture 
of revolt, but it is only a gesture. There is not a 

[97] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

single daily in the United States that would dare 
to discuss the problem of Jewish immigration 
honestly. Nine tenths of them, under the lash of 
snobbish Jewish advertisers, are even afraid to call 
a Jew a Jew; their orders are to call him a Hebrew, 
which is regarded as sweeter. During the height 
of the Bolshevist scare not one American paper ven- 
tured to direct attention to the plain and obtrusive 
fact that the majority of Bolshevists in Russia and ; 
Germany and at least two-thirds of those taken in 
the United States were of the faith of Moses, Men- 
delssohn and Gimbel. But the Jews are perhaps 
not the worst. The Methodists, in all save a few 
big cities, exercise a control over the press that is 
far more rigid and baleful. In the Anti-Saloon 
League they have developed a machine for terroriz- 
ing office-holders and the newspapers that is re- 
markably effective, and they employed it during the 
long fight for Prohibition to throttle all opposition 
save the most formal. 

In this last case, of course, the idealists who thus 
forced the speak-easy upon the country had an easy 
task, for all of the prevailing assumptions and 
prejudices of the mob were in their favour. No 
doubt it is true, as has been alleged, that a 

[98] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

majority of the voters of the country were against 
Prohibition and would have defeated it at a ple- 
biscite, but equally without doubt a majority of 
them were against the politicians so brutally 
clubbed by the Anti-Saloon League, and ready 
to believe anything evil of them, and eager 
to see them manhandled. Moreover, the League 
had another thing in its favour: it was operated by 
strictly moral men, oblivious to any notion of 
honour. Thus it advocated and procured the 
abolition of legalized liquor selling without the 
slightest compensation to the men who had invested 
their money in the business under cover of and 
even at the invitation of the law— a form of repu- 
diation and confiscation unheard of in any other 
civilized country. Again, it got through the con- 
stitutional amendment by promising the liquor men 
to give them one year to dispose of their lawfully 
accumulated stocks — and then broke its promise 
under cover of alleged war necessity, despite the 
fact that the war was actually over. Both pro- 
ceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honour, failed 
to arouse any indignation among the plain people. 
On the contrary the plain people viewed them as, 
in some vague way, smart and creditable, and as, in 

[99] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

any case, thoroughly justified by the superior moral 
obligation that we have hitherto discussed. 

Thus the Boobus americanus is lead and watched 
over by zealous men, all of them highly skilled at 
training him in the way that he should think and 
act. The Constitution of his country guarantees 
that he shall be a free man and assumes that he is 
intelligent, but the laws and customs that have 
grown up under that Constitution give the lie to 
both the guarantee and the assumption. It is the 
fundamental theory of all the more recent American 
law, in fact, that the average citizen is half-witted, 
and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices 
or his own thoughts. If there were not regulations 
against the saloon (it seems to say) he would get 
drunk every day, dissipate his means, undermine his 
health and beggar his family. If there were not 
postal regulations as to his reading matter, he would 
divide his time between Bolshevist literature and 
pornographic literature and so become at once 
an anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not 
forbidden under heavy penalites to cross a state line 
with a wench, he would be chronically unfaithful 
to his wife. Worse, if his daughter were not pro- 
tected by statutes of the most draconian severity, 
[100] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

she would succumb to the first Italian she en- 
countered, yield up her person to him, enroll her- 
self upon his staff and go upon the streets. So 
runs the course of legislation in this land of free- 
men. We could pile up example upon example, 
but will defer the business for the present. Per- 
haps it may be resumed in a work one of us is now 

I engaged upon — a full length study of the popular 
mind under the republic. But that work will take 

I years. ... 

! VII 

No doubt we should apologize for writing, even 
( so, so long a preface to so succinct a book. The 
I one excuse we can think of is that, having read it, 
I one need not read the book. That book, as we have 
I said, may strike the superficial as jocular, but in 
I actual fact it is a very serious and even profound 
i composition, not addressed to the casual reader, but 
to the scholar. Its preparation involved a great 
j diligence, and its study is not to be undertaken 
{ lightly. What the psychologist will find to admire 
I in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking, 
I its laborious erudition, but its compression. It 
j establishes, we believe, a new and clearer method 

[101] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

for a science long run to turgidity and flatulence. 
Perhaps it may be even said to set up an entirely 
new science, to wit, that of descriptive sociological 
psychology. We believe that this field will attract 
many men of inquiring mind hereafter and yield 
a valuable crop of important facts. The experi- 
mental method, intrinsically so sound and useful, 
has been much abused by orthodox psychologists; 
it inevitably leads them into a trackless maze of 
meaningless tables and diagrams; they keep their 
eyes so resolutely upon the intellectual process that 
they pay no heed to the primary intellectual ma- 
terials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that the 
conclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that 
he harbours and the crazes that sway him are of 
much less significance than the fundamental as- 
sumptions upon which they are all based. 

There has been, indeed, some discussion of those 
fundamental assumptions of late. We have heard, 
for example, many acute discourses upon the effects 
produced upon the whole thinking of the German 
people, peasants and professors alike, by the under- 
lying German assumption that the late Kaiser was 
anointed of God and hence above all ordinary 
human responsibility. We have heard talk, too, of 
[102] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the curious Irish axiom that there is a mysterious 
something in the nature of things, giving the Irish 
people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as 
they please, regardless of the safety of their next- 
door neighbours. And we have heard many out- 
landish principles of the same sort from political 
theorists, e. g., regarding the inalienable right of 
democracy to prevail over all other forms of 
government and the inalienable right of all national 
groups, however small, to self-determination. 
Well, here is an attempt to assemble in convenient 
form, without comment or interpretation, some of 
the fundamental beliefs of the largest body of 
human beings now under one flag in Christendom. 
It is but a beginning. The field is barely platted. 
It must be explored to the last furlong and all its 
fantastic and fascinating treasures unearthed and 
examined before ever there can be any accurate 
understanding of the mind of the American people. 

George Jean Nathan 
H. L. Mencken 
New York, 1920. 



[103] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

That the philoprogenitive instinct in rabbits is so 
intense that the alliance of two normally assiduous 
rabbits is productive of 265 offspring in one year. 

§2 

That there are hundreds of letters in the Dead 
Letter Office whose failure to arrive at their in- 
tended destinations was instrumental in separating 
as many lovers. 

§3 

That the Italian who sells bananas on a push-cart 
always takes the bananas home at night and sleeps 
with them under his bed. 

§4 

That a man's stability in the community and 
reliability in business may be measured by the num- 
ber of children he has. 

[107] 






THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§5 

That in Japan an American can buy a beautiful 
geisha for two dollars and that, upon being bought, 
she will promptly fall madly in love with him and 
will run his house for him in a scrupulously clean 
manner. 

§6 ! 

That all sailors are gifted with an extraordinary 
propensity for amour, but that on their first night 
of shore leave they hang around the water-front 
blind-pigs and are given knock-out drops. 

§7 

That when a comedian, just before the rise of the 
curtain, is handed a telegram announcing the death 
of his mother or only child, he goes out on the stage 
and gives a more comic performance than ever. 

§8 

That the lions in the cage which a lion-tamer 
enters are always sixty years old and have had all 
their teeth pulled. 

That the Siamese Twins were joined together by 
[108] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

gutta percha moulded and painted to look like a 
shoulder blade. 

§10 

That if a woman about to become a mother plays 
the piano every day, her baby will be bom a 
Victor Herbert. 

§11 

That all excursion boats are so old that if they 
ran into a drifting beer-keg they would sink. 

§12 

That a doctor knows so much about women that 
I he can no longer fall in love with one of them. 

§13 

That when one takes one's best girl to see the 
monkeys in the zoo, the monkeys invariably do 
something that is very embarrassing. 

§14 

That firemen, awakened suddenly in the middle 
of the night, go to fires in their stocking feet. 
[109] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§15 

That something mysterious goes on in the rooms 
back of chop suey restaurants. 

§16 

That oil of pennyroyal wiU drive away mos- 
quitoes. 

§17 

That the old ladies on summer hotel verandas 
devote diemselves entirely to the discussion of 
scandals. 

§18 

That a bachelor, expecting a feminine visitor, 
by way of subtle preliminary strategy smells up his 
rooms widi Japanese punk. 

§19 

That all one has to do to gather a large crowd in 
New York is to stand on the curb a few moments 
and gaze intently at the sky. 

§20 

That one can get an excellent bottle of wine in 
France for a franc. 

[110] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



21 

That it is dangerous to drink out of a garden 
hose, since if one does one is likely to swallow a 
snake. 

§22 
That all male negroes can sing. 

§23 

That when a girl enters a hospital as a nurse, her 
primary object is always to catch one of the doc- 
tors. 

§24 

That the postmasters in small towns read all the 
postcards. 

§25 

That a young girl ought to devote herself sedu- 
lously to her piano lessons since, when she is 
married, her playing will be a great comfort to her 
husband. 

§26 

That all theater box-office employes are very im- 
polite and hate to sell a prospective patron a ticket. 

[Ill] 



^THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§27 
That all great men have illegible signatures. 

§28 

That all iron-moulders and steam-fitters, back in 
the days of freedom, used to get drunk every Satur- 
day night. 

§29 

That if a man takes a cold bath regularly every 
morning of his life he will never be ill. 

§30 

That ginger snaps are made of the sweepings of 
the floor in the bakery. 

§31 

That every circus clown's heart is breaking for 
one reason or another. 

§32 

That a bull-fighter always has so many women in 
love with him that he doesn't know what to do. 

§33 

That George M. Cohan spends all his time hang- 
[112] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

ing around Broadway cafes and street-corners mak- 
ing flip remarks. 

§34 

That one can never tell accurately what the public 
wants. 

§35 

That every time one sat upon an old-fashioned 
horse-hair sofa one of the protruding sharp hairs 
would stab one through the union suit. 

§36 

That when an ocean vessel collides with another 
vessel or hits an iceberg and starts to sink, the 
ship's band promptly rushes up to the top deck and 
begins playing "Nearer, My God, to Thee." 

§37 

That in no town in America where it has played 
has "Uncle Tom's Cabin" ever failed to make 
money. 

§38 

That the tenement districts are the unhealthy 
places they are because the dwellers hang their bed-, 
clothing out on the fire-escapes. 
[113] 



THE A^JERICAN CREDO 

§39 

That, in small towTi hotels, tlie tap marked "hot 
water' always gives forth cold water and that the 
tap marked "cold" always gives fordi hot. 

§40 

Tliat every lieutenant in the American army w^ho 
went to France had an affair witli a French com- 
tesse. 

§41 

That when cousins marr}', tlieir children are bom 
blind, deformed, or imbecile. 

§42 

That a cat falling from the twentieth stort' of the 
Singer Building will land upon the pavement be- 
low on its feet, uninjured and as frisky as ever. 

§43 

That the accumulation of great wealtli always 
brings with it great unhappiness. 

§44 

That it is unlucky to count the carriages in a 
funeral. 

[114] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§45 

That the roulette wheel at Monte Carlo is con- 
trolled by a wire as thin as a hair which is con- 
trolled in turn by a button hidden beneath the rug 
near the operator's great toe. 

§46 

That Polish women are so little human that one 
of them can have a baby at 8 A. M. and cook her 
husband's dinner at noon. 

§47 
That Henry James never wrote a short sentence. 

§48 
That it is bad luck to kill a spider. 

§49 

That German peasants are possessed of a pro- 
found knowledge of music. 

§50 

That every coloured cook has a lover who never 
works, and that she feeds him by stealing the best 
part of every dish she cooks. 
[115] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§51 

That George Bernard Shaw doesn't really believe 
anything he writes. 

§52 

That the music of Richard Wagner is all played 
fortissimo, and by cornets. 

§53 

That the Masonic order goes back to tlie days of 
King Solomon. 

§54 

That swearing is forbidden by the Bible. 

§55 
That all newspaper reporters carry notebooks. 

§56 
That whiskey is good for snake-bite. 

§57 

That surgeons often kill patients for the sheer 
pleasure of it. 

§58 

That ten drops of camphor in half a glass of 
water will prevent a cold. 
[116] 



I 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§59 

That the first thing a country jake does when he 
comes to New York is to make a bee line for Grant's 
Tomb and the Aquarium. 

§60 

That if one's nose tickles it is a sign that one is 
going to meet a stranger or kiss a fool. 

§61 

That if one's right ear burns, it is a sign that some 
one is saying nice things about one. 

§62 

That if one's left ear burns, it is a sign that some 
one is saying mean things about one. 

§63 

That French women use great quantities of per- 
fume in lieu of taking a bath. 

§64 

That a six-footer is invariably a virtuoso of 
amour superior to a man of, say, five feet seven. 
[117] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§65 

That a soubrette is always fifteen or twenty years 
older than she looks. 

§66 

That what impels most men to have their finger- 
nails manicured is a vanity for having manicured 
finger-nails. 

§67 

That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness. 

§68 

That when one twin dies, the other twin becomes 
exceedingly melancholy and soon also dies. 

§69 

That one may always successfully get a cinder 
out of the eye by not touching the eye, but by roll- 
ing it in an outward direction and simultaneously 
blowing the nose. 

§70 

That if one wears light weight underwear winter 
and summer the year 'round, one will never catch 
a cold. 

[118] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§71 

That a drunken man is invariably more bellicose 
than a sober man. 

§72 

That all prize-fighters and baseball players have 
their hair cut round in the back. 

§73 

That the work of a detective calls for excep- 
; tionally high sagacity and cunning. 

§74 

That on the first day of the season in the pleasure 
I parks many persons, owing to insufficiently tested 
apparatus, are regularly killed on the roller- 
coasters. 

§75 

That a play, a novel, or a short story with a happy 
ending is necessarily a commercialized and in- 
artistic piece of work. 

§76 

That a person who follows up a cucumber salad 
[119] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

with a dish of ice-cream will inevitably be the victim 
of cholera morbus. 

§77 

That a Sunday School superintendent is always 
carrying on an intrigue with one of the girls in the 
choir. 

§78 

That it is one of the marks of a gentleman that 
he never speaks evil of a woman. 

§79 
That a member of the Masons cannot be hanged. 

§80 

That a policeman can eat gratis as much fruit 
and as many peanuts off the street-corner stands as 
he wants. 

§ 81 } 

That the real President of the United States is 
J. P. Morgan. 

§82 

That onion breath may be promptly removed by 
drinking a little milk. 

[120] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



§83 

That onion breath may be promptly removed 
by eating a little parsley. 

§ 84 

That Catholic priests conduct their private con- 
versations in Latin. 

§85 
That John Drew is a great society man. 

§86 

That all Swedes are stupid fellows, and have 
very thick skulls. 

§87 

That all the posthumously printed stories of 
David Graham Phillips and Jack London have been 
written by hacks hired by the magazine editors and 
publishers. 

§88 

That a man like Charles Schwab, who has made 
a great success of the steel business, could in the 
same way easily have become a great composer 
[121] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

like Bach or Mozart had he been minded thus to 
devote his talents. 

§89 

That the man who doesn't hop promptly to his 
feet when the orchestra plays "The Star Spangled 
Banner" as an overture to Hurtig and Seamon's 
"Hurly-Burly Girlies" must have either rheu- 
matism or pro-Bolshevik sympathies, 

§90 

That every workman in Henry Ford's factory 
owns a pretty house in the suburbs and has a rose- 
garden in the back-yard. 

§91 

That all circus people are very pure and lead 
domestic lives. 

§92 

That if a spark hits a celluloid collar, the collar 
will explode. 

§93 

That when a bachelor who has hated children for 
twenty years gets married and discovers he is about 
to become a father, he is delighted. 
[122] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§94 

That drinking three drinks of whiskey a day will 
prevent pneumonia. 

§95 

That every negro who went to France with the 
army had a liaison with a white woman and won't 
look at a nigger wench any more. 

§96 
That all Russians have unpronounceable names. 

§97 
That awnings keep rooms cool. 

§98 

I That it is very difficult to decipher a railroad 
time-table. 

§99 

That gamblers may always be identified by their 
habit of wearing large diamonds. 

§100 

That when a man embarks in a canoe with a girl, 
[123] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

the chances are two to one that the girl will move ■ 
around when the boat is in mid-stream and upset it. 

§101 I 

That German babies are brought up on beer in 
place of milk. i 

§102 ' 

That a man with two shots of cocaine in him 
could lick Jack Dempsey. 



§ 103 ; 

That fully one half the repertoire of physical 
ailments is due to uric acid. 

§104 

That a woman, when buying a cravat for a man, 
always picks out one of green and purple with red 
polka-dots. 

§105 

That a negro's vote may always be readily bought 
for a dollar. 

§106 

That cripples always have very sunny disposi- 
tions. 

[124] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§107 

That if one drops a crust of bread into one's 
glass of champagne, one can drink indefinitely 
without getting drunk. 

§108 

That a brass band always makes one feel like 
marching. 

§109 

That, when shaving on a railway train, a man 
invariably cuts himself. 

§110 

That the male Spaniard is generally a handsome, 
flashing-eyed fellow, possessed of fiery temper. 

§111 

That after drinking a glass of absinthe one has 
peculiar hallucinations and nightmares. 

§112 

That since the Indians were never bald, baldness 
comes from wearing tight hats. 
[125] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§ 113 [ 

That all wine-agents are very loose men. 



§114 



i 



That the editor of a woman's magazine is always 
a lizzie. 

« 
§115 

That what is contained in the pitcher on the 
speakers' platform is always ice-water. 

§ 116 

Tliat all Senators from Texas wear somhreros, 
chew tobacco, expectorate profusely, and frequently 
employ tlie word "maverick." 

§117 

That the meters on taxicabs are covertly manipu- 
lated by the chauffeurs by means of wires hidden 
under the latters' seats. 

§118 

That Lillian Russell is as beautiful today as she 
was thirtv-five vears ago. 

[126] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§119 

That if a young woman can hold a lighted match 
in her fingers until it completely burns up, it is a 
sign that her young man really loves her. 

§120 

That if a young woman accidentally puts on her 
lingerie wrong side out, it is a sign that she will be 
married before the end of the year. 

§121 

That if a bride wears an old garter with her new 
finery, she will have a happy married life. 

§122 

That a sudden chill is a sign that somebody is 
^walking over one's grave. 

§123 

That some ignoble Italian is at the bottom of 
every Dorothy Arnold fugax, 

§124 

That a tarantula will not crawl over a piece of 
rope. 

[127] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§125 
That millionaires always go to sleep at the opera. 

§126 

. That Paderewski can get all the pianos he wants 
for nothing. 

§127 

That a bloodhound never makes a mistake. 

§128 
That celery is good for the nerves. 

§129 

That the jokes in Punch are never funny. 

§130 
That the Mohammedans are heathens. 

§131 

That a sudden shock may cause the hair to turn 
grey over night. 

§132 

That the farmer is an honest man, and greatly 
imposed upon. 

[128] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§133 

That all the antique furniture sold in America 
is made in Grand Rapids, Mich., and that the holes 
testifying to its age are made either with gimlets 
or by trained worms. 

§134 

That if a dog is fond of a man it is an infallible 
sign that the man is a good sort, and one to be 
trusted. 

§135 

That blondes are flightier than brunettes. 

§136 

That a nurse, however ugly, always looks beauti- 
ful to the sick man. 

§137 
That book-keepers are always round-shouldered. 

§138 

That if one touches a hop-toad, one will get 
warts. 

§139 

That a collar-button that drops to the floor when 
[129] 



\; 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

one is dressing invariably rolls into an obscure and 
inaccessible spot and eludes the explorations of its 
owner. 

§140 

That an American ambassador has the French, 
German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and 
Japanese languages at his finger tips, and is 
chummy with royalty. s 

§ 141 

That the ready-made mail order blue serge suits 
for men are put together with mucilage, and turn 
green after they have been in the sunlight for a day 
or two. 

§142 

That if one has only three matches left, the first 
two will invariably go out, but that the third and 
last will remain lighted. 

§143 
That all Chinamen smoke opium. 

§144 
That every country girl who falls has been se- 
duced by a man from the city. 
[130] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§145 

That an intelligent prize-fighter always triumphs 
over an ignorant prize-fighter, however superior the 
latter in agility and strength. 

§146 
That a doctor's family never gets sick. 

§147 
That nature designed a horse's tail primarily as 
a flicker-off of flies. 

§148 

That nicotine keeps the teeth in a sound con- 
dition. 

§149 
That when an Odd Fellow dies he is always given 
a magnificent funeral by his lodge, including a band 
and a parade. 

§150 
That the man who is elected president of the 
Senior Class in a college is always the most popular 
man in his class. 

§151 
That a minor actress in a theatrical company al- 
[131] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

ways considers the leading man a superb creature, 
and loves him at a distance. 

§152 
That a Southern levee is a gay place. 

§153 

That when a dog whines in the middle of the 
night, it is a sure sign that some one is going to die. 

§154 

That the stenographer in a business house is al- 
ways coveted by her employer, who invites her to 
luncheon frequently, gradually worms his way into 
her confidence, keeps her after office hours one 
day, accomplishes her ruin, and then sets her up in 
a magnificently furnished apartment in Riverside 
Drive and appeases her old mother by paying the 
latter's expenses for a summer holiday with her 
daughter at the seashore. 

§155 

That the extinction of the Indian has been a de- 
plorable thing. 

[132] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§156 
That everybody has a stomach-ache after Thanks- 
giving dinner. 

§157 
That, in summer, tan shoes are much cooler on 
the feet than black shoes. 

§158 
That every man who calls himself Redmond is a 
Jew whose real name is Rosenberg. 

§159 

That General Grant never directed a battle save 
with a cigar in his mouth. 

§160 

That there is something slightly peculiar about a 
man who wears spats. 

§161 

That the more modest a young girl is, the more 
innocent she is. 

§162 

That what a woman admires above everything 
else in a man is an upright character. 
[133] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
That seafaring men drink notliing but mm. 

^^ lt>4 

Tlial no family in the slums has less than six 
children. 

vN 165 

That a piece of camphor worn on a string around 
the neck will ward off disease. 

§166 

That a saloon with a sign reading *Tamily 
Entrance" on its side door invariably has a bawdy 
house upstairs. 

That the wife of a rich :r-.:-. -...•..■.>? wistfully 
loc^LS back into the past and wishes she had married 
a poor man. 

§16S 

That all persons prominent in smait society 
very dull. 

kn169 

That when orderins: a drink of whiskev at a bar, 
' [134] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

a man always used to instruct the bartender as to 
the size of the drink he desired by saying "two 
fingers" or "three fingers." 

§170 

That all the wine formerly served in Italian 
restaurants was made in tiie cellar, and was arti- 
ficially coloured with some sort of dye that was very 
harmful to tlie stomach. 

§171 
That all criminals get caught sooner or later. 

§172 

That stokers on ocean liners are from long 
service so used to the heat of the furnaces that they 
don't notice it. 

§173 

That what draws men to horse races is love of tlie 
sport. 

§174 

I That tarantulas often come from the tropics in 
bunches of bananas, and that when one of them 
j [135] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

stings a negro on the wharf he swells up, turns 
green and dies within three hours. 

§175 

That a man will do anything for the woman he 
loves. i 

§176 

That the reason William Gillette, who has been 
acting for over forty years, always smokes cigars 
in the parts he plays is because he is very nervous 
when on the stage. 

§177 

That the doughnut is an exceptionally indigest- 
ible article. 

§178 

That one captive balloon in every two containing 
persons on pleasure bent breaks away from its 
moorings, and drifts out to sea. 

§179 

That a workingman always eats what is in his 
dinnerpail with great relish. 
[136] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§180 

That children were much better behaved twenty 
years ago than they are today. 

§181 

That the cashier of a restaurant in adding up a 
customer's cheque always adds a dollar which is 
subsequently split between himself and the waiter. 

§182 

! That it is impossible to pronounce the word 
j "statistics" without stuttering. 

I § 183 

i That the profession of white slaving, in 1900 con- 
I trolled exclusively by Chinamen, has since passed 
I entirely under the control of Italians. 
I 

§184 

That every person in the Riviera lives in a 
"villa." 

§185 

That the chief form of headgear among the Swiss 
is the Alpine hat. 

[137] 



THE 


AMERICAN 


CREDO 








§186 






That each 


year a 


man volunteers to take 


his 


children to the circus 


merely as 


a subterfuge to 


go 


himself. 




§187 






That all marriages 


with actresses turn out badly. 



vN 188 

That San Francisco is a very gay place, and full 
of opium joints. 

§189 

That an elevator operator never succeeds in stop- 
ping his car on a level with the floor. 

§190 

That they don't make any pianos today as good' 

as the old square ones. 

§191 

That a man who habitually clears his throat be- 
fore he speaks is generally a self-important hypo- 
crite and a bluffer. 

[138] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§192 

That Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Dr. 
f Frank Crane, leads a monastic life. 

§193 

That whenever a vaudeville comedian quotes a 
'; familiar commercial slogan, such as "His Master's 
Voice," or "Eventually, why not now?", he is paid 
$50 a performance for doing so. 

§ 194 

That all Asiatic idols have large precious rubies 
i in their foreheads. 

§195 

That when the foe beheld Joan of Arc leading the 
French army against them, a look of terror froze 
their features and that, casting their arms from 
them, they broke into a frenzied and precipitate 
flight. 

§196 

That the late King Edward VII as Prince of 
Wales easily got every girl he wanted. 
[139] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§197 

That the penitentiaries of the United States con- 
tain a great number of hapless prisoners pos- 
sessed of a genuine gift for poetry. 

§198 

That if a cat gets into a room where a baby is 
sleeping, the cat will suck the baby's breath and 
kill it. 

§199 

That all men named Clarence, Claude or Percy 
are sissies. 

§200 

That a street car conductor steals every fifth 
nickel. 

§201 

That the security of a bank is to be estimated in 
proportion to the solidity of the bank building. 

§202 

That seventy-five per cent of all taxicab drivers 
have at one time or another been in Sing Sing. 
[140] 



i 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§203 

That one can buy a fine suit of clothes in London 
for twelve dollars. 

§204 

That the chicken salad served in restaurants is 
always made of veal. 

§205 

That a play without a bed in it never makes any 
money in Paris. 

§206 

That Conan Doyle would have made a wonderful 
detective. 

§207 

That an oyster-shucker every month or so dis- 
covers a pearl which he goes out and sells for five 
hundred dollars. 

§208 

That a napkin is always wrapped around a cham- 
pagne bottle for the purpose of hiding the label, and 
that the quality of the champagne may be judged 
by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is 
popped. 

[141] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§209 

That because a married woman remains loyal to 
her husband she loves him. 

§210 

That every time one blows oneself to a particu- 
larly expensive cigar and leans back to enjoy one- 
self with a good smoke after a hearty and satisfying 
dinner, the cigar proceeds to burn down the side. 

§211 

That when a police captain goes on a holiday he 
always gets boilingly drunk. 

§212 

That an Italian puts garlic in everything he eats, 
including coffee. 

§213 

That if one hits a negro on the head with a cob- 
blestone, the cobblestone will break. 

§214 

That all nuns have entered convents because of 
unfortunate love affairs. 

[142] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§215 

That, being surrounded by alcoholic beverages 
and believing the temptation would be irresistible 
once he began, a bartender in the old days never 
took a drink. 

§216 

That all millionaires are born in small ram- 
shackle houses situated near railroad tracks. 

§217 

That farmers afford particularly easy prey for 
I book-agents and are the largest purchasers of cheap 
sets of Guy de Maupassant, Rudyard Kipling and 
0. Henry. 

§218 
That George Washington never told a lie. 

§219 
That a dark cigar is always a strong one. 

§220 

That the night air is poisonous. 
[143] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§221 

That a hair from a horse's tail, if put into a bot- 
tle of water, will turn into a snake. 

§222 
That champagne is the best of all wines. 

§223 

That it snowed every Christmas down to fifteen 
years ago. 

§224 

That if a yoimg woman finds a piece of tea leaf 
floating around the top of her tea cup, it is a sign 
that she will be married before the end of the year. 

§225 

That if, after one lusty blow, a girl's birthday 
cake reveals nine candles still burning, it is a sign 
that it will be nine years before she gets married. 

§226 

That if, while promenading, a girl and her es- 
cort walk on either side of a water hydrant or 
other obstruction instead of both walking 'round it 
[144] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

on the same side, they will have a misunderstand- 
ing before the month is over. 

§227 

That it is imlikely that a man and woman who 
enter a hotel without baggage after 10 P. M. and 
register are man and wife. 

§228 

That all country girls have clear, fresh, rosy 
complexions. 

§229 

That chorus girls spend the time during the 
entr'-actes sitting around naked in their dressing- 
rooms telling naughty stories. 

§230 

That many soldiers' lives have been saved in bat- 
tle by bullets lodging in Bibles which they have 
carried in their breast pockets. 

§231 

That each year the Fourth of July exodus to the 
bathing beaches on the part of persons from the 
city establishes a new record. 
[145] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§232 
That women with red hair or wide nostrils are 
possessed of especially passionate natures. 

§233 
That three-fourths of the inhabitants of Denver 
are lungers who have gone there for the mountain 
air. 

§234 

That, when sojourning in Italy, one always feels 
very lazy. 

§235 

That the people of Johnstown, Pa., still talk of 
nothing but the flood. 

§236 
That there is no finer smell in the world than that 
of burning autumn leaves. 

§237 
That Jules Verne anticipated all the great modern 
inventions. 

§238 

That a man is always a much heartier eater than 
a woman. 

[146] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§239 

That all the girls in Mr. Ziegf eld's "Follies" are 
extraordinarily seductive, and that at least 40 head 
of bank cashiers are annually guilty of tapping the 
till in order to buy them diamonds and Russian 
sables. 

§240 

That a college sophomore is always a complete 
ignoramus. 

§241 

That rubbers in wet weather are a preventive of 
colds. 

§242 

That if one eats oysters in a month not contain- 
ing an "r," one is certain to get ptomaine poisoning. 

§243 

That a woman with a 7/4-C foot always tries to 
squeeze it into a 4/4-A shoe. 

§244 

That no shop girl ever reads anything but Laura 
j Jean Libbey and the cheap sex magazines. 

[147] 



THE 


AMERICAN 


CREDO 






§245 




f 


That there 


is something peculiar about a 


man 


who wears a 


red tie. 

§246 






That all 
whiskers. 


Bolsheviki and 


Anarchists 


have 



§247 

That all the millionaires of Pittsburgh are very- 
loud fellows, and raise merry hell with the chorus 
girls every time they go to New York. 

§248 

That a man of fifty-five is always more expe- 
rienced than a man of thirty-five. 

§249 
That new Bermuda potatoes come from Bermuda. 

§250 

That the boy who regularly stands at the foot of 
his class in school always turns out in later life to 
be very successful. 

[148] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§251 

That the ornamental daggers fashioned out of one 
hundred dollars' worth of Chinese coins strung to- 
gether, which one buys in Pekin or Hong Kong 
for three dollars and a quarter, are fashioned out 
of one hundred dollars' worth of Chinese coins. 

§252 

That it is hard to find any one in Hoboken, N. J., 
who can speak English. 

§253 

That the headwaiter in a fashionable restaurant 
has better manners than any other man in the 
place. 

§254 

That a girl always likes best the man who is 
possessed of a cavalier politeness. 

§255 

That the most comfortable room conceivable is 
one containing a great big open fireplace. 
[149] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§256 

That brunettes are more likely to grow stout in 
later years than blondes. 

§257 

That a sepia photograph of the Coliseum, framed, 
is a work of art. 

§258 

That every time one crosses the English Channel 
one encounters rough weather and is very sea-sick. 

§259 

That the Navajo blankets sold to trans-continental 
tourists by the Indians on the station platform at 
Albuquerque, New Mexico, are made by the Elite 
Novelty M'f'g. Co. of Passaic, N. J., and are bought 
by the Indians in lots of 1,000. 

§260 

That appendicitis is an ailment invented by sur- 
geons twelve years ago for money-making purposes 
and that, in the century before that time, no one 
was ever troubled with it. 

[150] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§261 

That a theatrical matinee performance is always 
inferior to an evening performance, the star being 
always eager to hurry up the show in order to get 
a longer period for rest before the night perform- 
ance. 

§262 

That John D. Rockefeller would give his whole 
I fortune for a digestion good enough to digest a 
cruller. 

§263 

That a clergyman leads an easy and lazy life, 
and spends most of his time visiting women parish- 
ioners while their husbands are at work. 

§264 

That it is almost sure death to eat cucumbers 
and drink milk at the same meal. 

§265 
That all bank cashiers, soon or late, tap the till. 

§266 

That the members of fashionable church choirs, 
[151] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

during the sermon, engage in kissing and hugging 
behind the pipe-organ. 

§267 

That women who are in society never pay any 
attention to their children, and wish that they would 
die. 

§268 

That if one gets one's feet wet, one is sure to 
catch cold. 

j269 

That all French women are very passionate, and 
will sacrifice eveiylhing to love. 

^^270 

That when a drunken man falls he never hurts 
himself. 

v>271 

That all Chinese laundrymen sprinkle their 
laundry by taking a mouthful of water and squirt- 
ing it out at their wash in a fine spray: and that, 
whatever the cost of living to a white man. the 
Chinese laundryman always lives on eight cents a 
dav. 

[152] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§272 

That if one fixes a savage beast with one's eye, 
the beast will remain rooted to the spot and pres- 
ently slink away. 

§273 

That if one eats cucumbers and then goes in 
swimming, one will be seized with a cramp. 

§274 

That hiccoughs may be stopped by counting 
slowly up to one hundred. 

§275 

That newspaper reporters hear, every day, a 
great many thumping scandals that they fail to 
print, and that they refrain through considerations 
of honour. 

§276 

That the young East Side fellow who plays vio- 
lin solos at the moving-picture theatre around the 
comer is so talented that, if he had the money to 
go to Europe to study, he would be a rival to 
Kreisler within three years. 
[153] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§277 

That Paderewski, during the piano-playing days, 
wore a wig, and was actually as bald as a coot. 

§278 

That lightning never strikes twice in the same 
place. 

§279 

That when a doctor finds there is nothing the 
matter with a man who has come to consult him, 
he never frankly tells the man there's nothing 
wrong with him, but always gives him bread pills. 

§280 

That, in a family crisis, the son always sticks 
to the mother and the daughter to the father. 

§281 
That beer is very fattening. 

§282 

That no man of first-rate mental attainments ever 
goes in for dancing. 

[154] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§283 
That a woman can't sharpen a lead pencil. 

§284 

That on every trans-Atlantic steamer there are 
two smooth gamblers who, the moment the ship 
docks, sneak over the side with the large sum of 
money they have won from the passengers. 

§285 

That if one gets out of bed on the left side in 
the morning, one has a mean disposition for the 
rest of the day. 

§286 

That a woman who has led a loose life is so 
grateful for the respect shown her by the man who 
asks her to marry him that she makes the best kind 
of wife. 

§287 

That fish is a brain food. 

§288 

That street-comer beggars have a great deal of 
[155] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

money hidden away at home imder the kitchen 
floor. 

§289 

That it is advisable for a young woman who 
takes gas when having a tooth pulled to be accom- 
panied by some one, by way of precaution against 
the dentist. 

§290 

That all girls educated in convents turn out in 
later life to be hell-raisers. 

§291 

That a young girl may always safely be trusted 
with the kind of man who speaks of his mother. 

§292 

That a nine-year-old boy who likes to play with 
toy steam engines is probably a bom mechanical 
genius and should be educated to be an engineer. 

§ 293 

That all celebrated professional humourists are 
in private life heavy and witless fellows. 
[156] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§294 

That when one stands close to the edge of a 
dizzy altitude, one is seized peculiarly with an im- 
pulse to jump off. 

§295 

That if one eats an apple every night before 
retiring, one will never be ill. 

§296 

That all negroes born south of the Potomac can 
play the banjo and are excellent dancers. 

§297 

. That whenever a negro is educated he refuses to 
! work and becomes a criminal. 

§298 

That whenever an Italian begins to dress like an 
American and to drive a Dodge car, it is a sign 
he has taken to black-handing or has acquired an 
interest in the white-slave trust. 

§299 

That, in the days when there were breweries, the 
men who drove beer-wagons drank 65 glasses of 
[157] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

beer a head a day, and that it didn't hurt them be- 
cause it came direct from the wood. 

§300 

That, until the time of American intervention, 
the people of the Philippines were all cannibals, 
and displayed the heads of their fallen enemies on 
poles in front of their houses. 

§301 

That whenever a crowd of boys goes camping in 
summer two or three of them are drowned, and the 
rest come home suffering from poison ivy. 

§302 

That whenever a will case gets into the courts, 
the lawyers gobble all the money, and the heirs 
come out penniless. 

§303 

That every female moving-picture star carries 
on an intrigue with her leading man, and will 
maTry him as soon as he can get rid of his poor 
first wife, who took in washing in order to pay for 
his education in the art of acting. 
[158] 






THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§304 

That all theatrical managers are Jews, and that 
most of them can scarcely speak English. 

§305 

That a great many of women's serious diseases 
are due to high French heels. 

§306 

That if one does not scratch a mosquito bite, it 
will stop itching. 

§307 

That when a girl gives a man a pen-knife for a 
present, their friendship will come to an unhappy 
end unless he exercises the precaution to ward off 
bad luck by giving her a penny. 

§308 

That whenever one takes an umbrella with one, 
it doesn't rain. 

§309 

That the cloth used in suits made in England is 
so good that it never wears out. 
[159] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§310 

That cinnamon drops are coloured red with a 
dye-stuff manufactured out of the dried bodies of 
cochineal insects. 

§311 

That the missionaries in China and Africa make 
fortunes robbing the natives they are sent out to 
convert. 

§312 

That there is a revolution in Central America 
every morning before breakfast, and that the sole 
object of all the revolutionary chiefs is to seize 
the money in the public treasury and make off to 
Paris. 

§313 

That whenever there is a funeral in an Irish 
family the mourners all get drunk and proceed to 
assault one another with clubs. 

§314 

That all immigrants come to America in search 
of liberty, and that when they attempt to exercise 
it they should be immediately sent back. 
[160] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§315 
That whenever a rich American girl marries a 
foreign nobleman, he at once gets hold of all her 
money, then beats her and then runs away with an 
actress. 

§316 

That if one begins eating peanuts one cannot 
stop. 

§317 

i That a bachelor never has any one to sew the 
buttons on his clothes. 

§318 

That whenever a dog wags his tail it is a sign 
that he is particularly happy. 

§319 

That an Italian street labourer can do a hard 
day's work on one large plate of spaghetti a day. 

§320 

That if one breaks a mirror one will have bad 
luck for seven years. 

[161] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§321 

That tvvo men seldom agree that the same girl is 
good-looking. 

§322 

That in the infinitesimal space of time between 
tlie springing of the trap-door and his dropping 
through it, a hanged man sees his entire life pass 
in panorama before him. 

§ 323 

That when Washington crossed the Delaware, he 
stood up in die bow of the boat holding aloft a 
large American flag. 

§324 

That whereas a man always hopes his first child 
will be a boy, his wife always hopes that it will be 
a girl. 

§325 

That the first time a boy smokes a cigar he al 
ways becomes deathly sick. 



§326 

That a woman always makes a practice of being 
■[162] 



I 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

deliberately late in keeping an appointment with 
a man. 

§327 

That if, encountering a savage beast in the jun- 
gle, one falls upon the ground, lies still and pre- 
tends that one is dead, the savage beast will 
] promptly make off and not hurt one. 

§328 

That if one sits in front of the Cafe de la Paix, 
in Paris, one will soon or late see everybody in 
the world that one knows. 

§329 

That it is always twice as hard to get rid of a 
summer cold as to get rid of a winter cold. 

§330 

That a soft speaking voice is the invariable mark 
of a well-bred man. 

§331 

That the persons who most vociferously applaud 
the playing of "Dixie" in restaurants are all North- 
[163] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

cmers who have never been further South than 
Allentown, Pa. 

§332 

That the larger the dog, the safer he is for chil- 
dren. 

§333 

That Catholic priests never solicit money from 
their parishioners, but merely assess them so much 
a head, and make them pay up instantly. 

§334 

That nine times in ten when one is in pain, and 
a doctor assures one that he is squirting morphine 
into one's arm, what he is really squirting in is 
only warm water. 

§335 

That a German civilian, before the war, had to 
get off the sidewalk whenever an army lieutenant 
approached him on the street, and that, if he failed 
to do so instantly, the lieutenant was free to run 
him through with his sword. 

§336 

That while it may be possible, in every indi- 
[164] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

vidual case of spiritualist communication with the 
dead, to prove fraud by the medium, the accumu- 
lated effect of such communications is to demon- 
strate the immortality of the soul. 

§337 

That an Italian who earns and saves $1,000 in 
America can take the money home, invest it in an 
estate, and live like a rich man thereafter. 

§338 

That all Mormons, despite the laws against it, 
still practise polygamy, and that they have agents 
all over the world recruiting cuties for their 
harems. 

§ 339 

That when a man goes to a photographer's to 
have his picture taken, the knowledge that he is 
having his picture taken always makes him very 
self-conscious, thus causing him to assume an ex- 
pression which results in the photograph being an 
inaccurate likeness. 

§340 

That if the lower line on the palm of one's hand 
[165] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

is a long one, it is a sign that one is going to live to 
a ripe old age. 

§341 

That Italian counts, before the war, always used 
to make their expenses when they came to America 
by acting as wine agents. 

§342 

That a Russian peasant, in the days of the czar, 
drank two quarts of vodka a day. 

§343 

That a German farmer can raise more produce 
on one acre of land than an American can raise 
on a hundred. 

§344 

That a boil on the neck purifies the blood and is 
worth $1,000. 

§345 

That whenever a Frenchman comes home unex- 
pectedly, some friend of the family makes a quick 
sneak out of the back door. 
[166] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§346 

That every negro servant girl spends at least 
half of her wages on preparations for taking the 
kink out of her hair. 

§347 

That the licorice candy sold in cheap candy 
stores is made of old rubber boots. 

§348 

That if a boy is given all he wants to drink at 
home he will not drink when he is away from home. 

§349 

That the second-class passengers on a trans-At- 
lantic steamship always have more fun than the 
first-class passengers. 

§ 350 

That a drunken man always pronounces every 
"s" as "sh." 

§351 

That champagne will prevent seasickness. 
[167] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



§352 

That thin ^vTists and slender ankles are immif 
takable signs of aristocratic breeding. 

§353 

That when one asks a girl to go canoeing she al- 
ways brings along a bright red or yellow sofa 
cushion. 

§354 

That when a woman buys cigars for a man she" 
always judges the quality of the cigars by the mag- 
nificence of the cigar-bands. 

§ 355 

That candle light makes a woman forty -five years 
old look fifteen years younger. 

§356 

That the winters in the United States are a good 
deal less cold than they used to be, and that the 
change has been caused by the Gulf Stream. 

§357 

That the Thursday matinees given by Chauncey 
Olcott are attended onlv hv Irish servant girls. 
[168] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§358 

That the reason the British authorities didn't 
lock up Bernard Shaw during the war was because 
they were afraid of his mind. 

§359 

That Professor Gamer was able to carry on long 
and intimate conversations with monkeys in their 
own language. 

§360 

That oysters are a great aphrodisiac. 

§361 

That if one sleeps with one's head on a high 
pillow one will be round-shouldered. 

§362 

That coal miners get so dirty that they have to 
wash so often that they are the cleanest working- 
men in the world. 

§363 

That the average French housewife can make 
such a soup out of the contents of a garbage-can 
that the eater will think he is at the Ritz. 
[169] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§364 

That such authors as Dr. Frank Crane and Her- 
bert Kaufman do not really believe what they 
write, but print it simply for the money that is in it. 

§ 365 

That the average newspaper cartoonist makes 
$100,000 a year. I 

§ 366 I 

That when a play is given in an insane asylum 
the inmates always laugh at the tragic moments 
and cry at the humorous moments. 

§ 367 ! 

That if a girl takes the last cake off a plate she 
will die an old maid. 

§ 368 ' 

That men high in public affairs always read 
detective stories for diversion. 

§ 369 

That the wireless news bulletins posted daily on 
ocean liners are made up on board. 
[170] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§370 

That the Swiss, when they sing, always yodel. 

§371 
That all German housewives are very frugal. 

§372 

That if one holds a buttercup under a person's 
chin and a yellow light is reflected upon that per- 
son's chin, it is a sign that he likes butter. 

§373 

That all penny-in-the-slot weighing machines 
make a fat woman lighter and a thin woman 
heavier. 

§ 374 

That in the period just before a woman's baby 
is bom the woman's face takes on a peculiar spir- 
itual and holy look. 

§375 

That when a Chinese laundryman hands one a 
slip for one's laundry, the Chinese letters which 
he writes on the slip have nothing to do with the 
[171] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

laundry but are in reality a derogatory descrip- 
tion of the owner. 

§376 

That an old woman with rheumatism in her leg 
can infallibly predict when it is going to rain. 

§ 377 
That Philadelphia is a very sleepy town. 

§ 378 ! 

That it is impossible for a man to learn how to 
thread a needle. \ 

§379 

That there is something unmanly about a grown 
man playing the piano, save only when he plays it 
in a bordello. 

§380 

That a couple of quinine pills, with a chaser of 
rye whiskey, will cure a cold. 

§381 ' 

That all Congressmen who voted for Prohibition 
are secret ] ushers and have heavy stocks of all 
sorts of liquors in their cellars. 
[172] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

; §382 

That a recent President of the United States was 
a great fellow with the gals, and used to carry 
on with a stock-company actress. 

§383 
That all the best cooks are men. 

§384 

That all Japanese butlers are lieutenants in the 
Japanese Navy and that they read and copy all 
I letters received by the folks they work for. 

I §385 

That the best way to stop nose-bleed is to drop a 
door-key down the patient's back. 

§386 

That a thunder-storm will cause milk to turn 
sour. 

§387 

That if a man drinks three glasses of buttermilk 
every day he will never be ill. 
[173] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§388 

That whenever two Indians meet they greet each 
other with the word "How!" 

§389 

That the Justices of the Supreme Court of the 
United States all chew tobacco while hearing cases, 
but that they are very serious men otherwise, and 
never laugh, or look at a pretty girl, or get tight. 

§390 

That all negro prize-fighters marry white women, 
and that they afterward beat them. 

§391 

That New Orleans is a very gay town and full of 
beautiful French Creoles. 

§392 
That gin is good for the kidneys. 

§393 

That the English lower classes are so servile that 
they say "Thank you, sir," if one kicks them in the 
pantaloons. 

[174] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§394 

That the gipsies who go about the country are 
all horse-thieves, and that they will put a spell upon 
the cattle of any farmer who has them arrested for 
stealing his mare. 

§395 

That every bachelor of easy means has an illicit 
affair with a grass widow in a near-by city and is 
the father of several illegitimate children. 

§396 

That a country editor receives so many presents 
of potatoes, corn, rutabagas, asparagus, country 
ham, carrots, turnips, etc., that he never has to 
buy any food. 

§397 

That whenever news reached him of another Fed- 
eral disaster Abraham Lincoln would laugh it off 
with a very funny and often somewhat smutty 
story, made up on the spot. 

§ 398 

That George Washington died of a heavy cold 
brought on by swimming the Potomac in the heart 
[175] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 






of winter to visit a yellow girl on the Maryland 
shore. 

§399 

That all negroes who show any intelligence what- 
ever are actually two-thirds white, and the sons of 
United States Senators. '^ 

§400 

That the late King Leopold of Belgium left 350 
illegitimate children. 

§401 

That Senator Henry Cabot Lodge is a very brainy 
man, though somewhat stuck up. 

§402 

That if one eats ice-cream after lobster one will 
be doubled up by belly-ache. 

§403 

That Quakers, for all their religion, are always 
very sharp traders and have a great deal of money 
hidden away in banks. 

[176] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§404 

That old baseball players always take to booze, 
and so end their days either as panhandlers, as 
night watchmen or as janitors of Odd Fellows' 
haUs. 

§405 

That the object of the players, in college foot- 
ball, is to gouge out one another's eyes and pull 
off one another's ears. 

§406 

That the sort of woman who carries around a 
Pomeranian dog, if she should ever have a child 
inadvertently, would give the midwife $500 to 
make away with it. 

§407 

That a woman likes to go to a bargain sale, fight 
her way to the counter, and have pins stuck into 
her and her feet mashed by other women. 

§408 

That, if one swallows an ounce of olive oil be- 
fore going to a banquet, one will not get drunk. 
[177] 



THE AMERICAN 


CREDO 1 


sn409 

That a mud-turtle is so tenacious of life that if 
one cuts off his head a new one will grow in ita 



place. 

§410 

That the only things farmers read are govern 
ment documents and patent-medicine almanacs 



I 



§ 411 { 

That if one's ear itches it is a sign that some one 
is talking of one. 

§412 

That Italian children, immediately they leave the 
cradle, are sewed into their underclothes, and that 
they never get a bath thereafter until they are con- 
firmed. 

§413 

That all Catholic priests are very hearty eaters, 
and have good wine cellars. 

§414 

That politics in America would be improved by 
turning all the public offices over to business men. 
[178] 



I 

THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§415 

That department store sales are always fakes, 
and that they mark down a few things to attract 
the women and then swindle them by lifting the 
prices on things they actually want. 

§416 

That 100,000 abortions are performed in Chi- 
cago every year. 

§417 
That John D. Rockefeller has a great mind, and 
would make a fine President if it were not for his 
craze for money. 

§418 

That all the Jews who were drafted during the 
late war were put into the Quartermaster's Depart- 
ment on account of their extraordinary business 
acumen. 

§419 

That a jury never convicts a pretty woman. 

§ 420 

That chorus girls in the old days got so tired of 
[179] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

drinking champagne that the sound of a cork pop- 
ping made them shudder. 

§421 

That the Massachusetts troops, after the first bat- 
tle of Bull Run, didn't stop running until they 
reached Harrisburg, Pa. 

§422 

That General Grant was always soused during a 
battle, and that on the few occasions when he was 
sober he got licked. 



§423 

That the late King Edward used to carry on in 
Paris at such a gait that he shocked even the 
Parisians. 

§424 

That it takes an Englishman two days to see a 
joke, and that he always gets it backward even then 



k 



§425 

That headwaiters in fashionable hotels make 
$100 a day. 

[180] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§426 



That if a bat flies into a woman's hair, the hair 
must be cut off to get it out. 

§427 

That all the women in Chicago have very large 

feet. 

§428 

That on cold nights policemen always sneak into 
stables on their beats and go to sleep. 

§429 
That all the schoolboys in Boston have bulged 
brows, wear large spectacles and can read Greek. 

§430 
That all dachshunds come from Germany. 

§431 
That nine out of every ten Frenchmen have 

syphilis. 

§432 

That the frankfurters sold at circuses and pleas- 
ure parks are made of dog meat. 
[181] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§433 

That all the cheaper brands of cigarettes are 
sophisticated with drugs, and in time cause those 
who smoke them to get softening of the brain. 

§434 
That rock-and-rye will cure a cold. 

§435 

That a country boy armed with a bent pin can 
catch more fish than a city angler with the latest 
and most expensive tackle. 

§436 
That red-haired girls are especially virulent. 

§437 
That all gamblers eventually go broke. 

§438 

That the worst actress in the company is always 
the manager's wife. 

§439 

That an elephant in a circus never forgets a per- 
[182] 



I 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

son who gives him a chew of tobacco or a rotten pea- 
nut, but will single him out from a crowd years 
afterward and bash in his head with one colossal 
blow. 

§440 
That it is unlucky to put your hat on a bed. 

§441 

That an old sock makes the best wrapping for a 
sore throat. 

§442 

That lighting three cigarettes with one match will 
bring some terrible calamity upon one or other of 
the three smokers. 

§443 

That milking a cow is an operation demanding a 
special talent that is possessed only by yokels, and 
that a person bom in a large city can never hope 
to acquire it. 

§444 

That whenever there is a rough-house during a 
strike, it is caused by foreign anarchists who are 
trying to knock out American idealism. 
[183] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§445 

That, whatever the demerits of Jews otherwise, 
they are always very kind to their old parents. 

§446 

That the Swiss army, though small, is so strong 
that not even the German army in its palmy days 
could have invaded Switzerland, and that it is strong 
because all Swiss are patriots to the death. 

§447 

That when two Frenchmen fight a duel, whether 
with pistols or with swords, neither of them is ever 
hurt half so much as he would have been had he 
fought an honest American wearing boxing-gloves. 

§448 

That whenever Prohibition is enforced in a re- 
gion populated by negroes, they take to morphine, 
heroin and other powerful drugs, and begin mur- 
dering all of the white inhabitants. 

§449 

That all the great writers of the world now use 
typewriters. 

[184] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§450 

That all Presidents of the United States get 

many hot tips on the stock-market, but that they 

are too honourable to play them, and so turn them 

over to their wives, who make fortunes out of them. 

§451 
That Elihu Root is an intellectual giant, and that 
it is a pity the suspicion of him among farmers 
makes it impossible to elect him President. 

§452 
That no man not a sissy can ever learn to thread 
a needle or dam a sock. 

§453 
That all glass blowers soon or late die of con- 
sumption. 

§454 
That all women who go in bathing at the French 
seaside resorts affect very naughty one-piece bath- 
ing suits. 

§455 
That George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin can 
only play the piano with one finger. 
[185] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§456 
That farmers always go into gold mine swindles 
because of the magnificently embossed stock cer- 
tificates. 

§457 

That the Germans eat six regular meals a day, 
and between times stave off their appetite with 
numerous Schweitzer cheese sandwiches, blutwurst 
and beer. 

§ 458 

That David Belasco teaches his actresses how to 
express emotion by knocking them down and pull- 
ing them around the stage by the hair. 



§459 

That only Americans travel in the first class car 
riages of foreign railway trains, and that fashion- 
able Englishmen always travel third class. 



§460 

That the whiskey sold in blind pigs contains 
wood alcohol and causes those who drink it to go 
blind. 

[186] 



1 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§461 

That wealthy society women never wear their 
pearl necklaces in public, but always keep them at 
home in safes and wear indistinguishable imita- 
tions instead. 

§462 

That the late Charles Yerkes had no less 
than twenty girls, for each of whom he provided a 
Fifth Avenue mansion and a yearly income of 
$50,000. 

§463 

That when one goes to a railroad station to meet 
some one, the train is never on time. 

§464 

That the theatregoers in the Scandinavian 
countries care for nothing but Ibsen and Strind- 
berg. 

§465 

That all doctors write prescriptions illegibly. 
[187] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§466 
. That Englishwomen are very cold. 

§467 

That when the weather man predicts rain it al- 
ways turns out fair, and that when he predicts fair 
it always rains. t 

§ 468 I 

That lemon juice will remove freckles. 

§469 

That if a woman wears a string of amber beads 
she will never get a sore throat. 

§ 470 
That no well-bred person ever chews gum. 

§471 

That all actors sleep till noon, and spend the 
afternoon calling on women. 

§472 

That the men who make sauerkraut press it into 
barrels by jumping on it with their bare feet. 
[188] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§473 

That the moment a nigger gets eight dollars, he 
goes to a dentist and has one of his front teeth filled 
with gold. 

§474 

That one never sees a Frenchman drunk, all the 
souses whom one sees in Paris being Americans. 

§ 475 

That a daughter is always a much greater com- 
fort to a mother in after life than a son. 

§476 

That a man with a weak, receding chin is always 
a nincompoop. 

§477 

That English butlers always look down on their 
American employers, and frequently have to leave 
the room to keep from laughing out loud. 

§478 

That the most faithful and loving of all dogs is 
the Newfoundland. 

[189] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§479 

That a man always dislikes his mother-in-law, 
and goes half -crazy every time she visits him. 

§480 

That St. Louis in summer is the hottest place in 
the world. 

r 

( 

§481 5 

That all the men in the moving picture business 
were formerly cloak and suit merchants, and that 
they are now all millionaires. 

§482 

That the accumulation of money makes a man 
hard, and robs him of all his finer qualities. 

§483 I 

That, in an elevator, it is always a man who 
usurps the looking-glass. 

§484 

That it is very unlucky to wear an opal. 
[190] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§485 

That if a man's eyebrows meet, it is a sign that 
he has a very unpleasant nature. 

§486 

That a negro ball always ends up in a grand 
free-for-all fight, in which several coons are mor- 
tally slashed with razors. 

§487 

That if Houdini were locked up in Sing Sing, 
he would manage to make his get-away in less than 
half an hour's time. 

§488 
That Bob IngersoU is in hell. 

§489 

That monkey-glands will restore a man of 85 
to the vigor of 21, and cause him to elope with a 
Swedish servant-girl and become the father of 
twins. 



[191] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§490 

That the Pullman conductor always has a lower 
berth in reserve and can fix it for you if he is 
properly approached. 

§491 

That if an understudy makes a hit, the regular 
actor or actress immediately gets well and never 
misses another performance. 

§492 

That Aaron Burr possessed an irresistible charm 
for all the women with whom he came in contact, 
and that the virtue of even the most strait-laced 
was a very poor risk if left in a room alone with 
him as long as ten minutes. 

§493 

That whenever Stonewall Jackson prayed before 
a battle, it was a sure sign that the fighting was 
going to be very sanguinary and that lots of Yan- 
kees would be out of luck. 
[192] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§494 

That all schoolchildren are inordinately happy 
but don't know it. 



§ 495 

That a goat will wax fat on a diet of tin cans 
and back numbers of the Saturday Evening Post. 

§496 

That a little girl who is markedly pretty between 
the years of six and ten will probably lose all of 
her physical charms before she is grown; and that 
one who, at the same age, is hideously ugly will 
probably develop into a rare beauty. 

§497 

That no atheist has ever seriously contemplated 
the stars or the growth of a jimpson weed. 

§498 

That all English schoolboys call their fathers 
"pater" and write excellent Latin verse. 
[193] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§499 

That very ugly people are usually fascinating. 

§500 

That any English naval oflScer can easily drink 
a quart of whiskey in an evening and show no 
signs of intoxication. 

§501 

That the movie editors steal all of the good plots 
from the scenarios which amateurs have submitted. 

§502 

That it takes the united eflforts of a large Per- 
sian family forty years to make one dining-room 
rug. 

§503 

That whenever grown people talk scandal in the 
presence of children, the little tots promptly rush 
ofif to the neighbours and repeat it. 
[194] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 


§504 

That only about one out of every hundred Ameri- 
can citizens has any idea of the real issues of the 
campaign when he votes on election day. 



§505 

That the chief duty of a fireman, when not en- 
gaged in answering alarms, is to sit next to a warm 
fire in the hose-house and play checkers. 

§506 

That paper-hangers leave a room in a complete 
mess after they have finished their work. 

§507 

That an illegitimate child is always more or less 
gifted with artistic promptings, and usually turns 
out to be a poet or a violinist. 

§508 

That a circus is never as good as its posters lead 
one to believe. 

[195] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§509 

That candy ruins the teeth. 

§510 

That buttermilk is excellent for the complexion. 

§511 

That one can infallibly tell a cigar is a good 
one if the ashes remain on the end and don't fall 
off. 

§512 

That all press-agents are liars. 

§513 

That jewellers, in cleaning or repairing costly 
baubles, invariably remove the original stones and 
insert others made of paste. 

§514 

That all moving pictures of English country life 
are staged in Fort Lee, New Jersey. 
[196] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§515 

That if one steps on a rusty tack one will inevi- 
tably get lock-jaw. 

§516 

That it helps a young man in business if he grows 
a moustache. 

§517 
That barbers are inordinately loquacious. 

§518 

That having a baby interferes with an actress' 
career. 

§519 

That when one takes one's best girl buggy riding 
the horse never respects the situation. 

§520 

That when one buys a promising looking pack- 
age at a sale of unclaimed freight, it always con- 
1197] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

tains a set of burglar tools or the collected works 
of F. Marion Crawford. 

§521 

That the French steamship lines serve excellent 
wine gratis. 

§522 

That a policeman is never around when he is 
wanted. 

§523 

That the negro is absolutely unreliable, and that 
it is impossible to count upon him doing what he 
promises to do. 

§524 

That Theda Bara was bom in Arabia. 

§525 

That the invariable dessert in a third-rate board- 
ing house is stewed prunes. 
[198] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§526 

That Clara Morris was so good in "Canaille'* 
because she used to go around to the hospitals and 
study the way women suflFering from tuberculosis 
died. 

§527 

That one can buy practically everything in Ko- 
komo that is on sale in the Rue de la Paix. 

§528 

That home-cooking is far more appetizing than 
that in the best restaurant. 

§529 

That all graduates of Harvard wear horn-rimmed 
spectacles and speak with a marked English accent. 

§530 

That before the Volstead act nobody ever at- 
tempted a round of golf without drinking ten cock- 
tails, and that since national prohibition the aver- 
[199] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

age player has reduced his record for the course by 
at least five strokes. 

§531 

That a young man who fails in business invari- 
ably dances the tango with great skill. 

§532 

That no traveller ever remembers anything of 
Rome except the fact that he paid $7 a day for his 
room and had to walk down the hallway to get a 
bath. 

§533 

That neither of the parties to a stage kiss derives 
any enjoyment from it. 

§534 

That no college professor understands baseball, 
but that every college professor sneaks off at 
periodic intervals to enjoy a good hot burlesque 
show. 

§535 

That all insane people insist that they are sane. 
[200] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§536 

That all patent-medicines are hooch in disguise. 

§537 

That seagulls fly 'around and around, never 
alighting until they drop dead from exhaustion. 

§538 

That motion-picture directors always throw away 
the working 'script after the first scene, and make 
up the action as the play progresses. 

§ 539 

That country garage-keepers sprinkle the nearby 
roads with crushed glass. 

§540 

That revenue officials imbibe at least three- 
fourths of the booze that they confiscate. 

§541 

That no matter how badly she wants to be kissed, 
[201] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

a girl will demur for a time just to make things 
interesting. 

§542 

That clergymen slip on store collars with ties 
attached whenever they leave their sacred duties, 
and raise hell in general. 

§ 543 

That any dish which has a French name is 
covered with a sauce that looks like glue. 

§544 

That a young man who inherits $100,000 in- 
variably squanders his fortune before he is thirty- 
five. 

§545 

That all the most successful sirens are blondes. 

§546 

That rich women invariably dress in dowdy 
[202] 



I 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

fashion and are mistaken for the servants of their 
French maids. 

§547 

That women who are able to afford servants 
wear kimonos during the greater part of the day 
and read best sellers. 

§548 

That deacons drive hard bargains. 

§549 

That farm hands begin each day by eating three 
dozen pancakes. 

§550 

That New Yorkers are the most provincial people 
in the world. 

§551 

That men who commute finally grow not to mind 
it 

§552 

That suburbanites always leave a play before it 
[203] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

is over so that they can catch the last train home. 

§553 

That steamer acquaintances never become real 
friends. 

§554 

That trapeze performers often fall on purpose, 
in order to convince the audience of the difficulties 
of their profession. 

§555 

That all the poetry in magazines is bad, and is 
accepted merely to fill up blank spaces at the bot- 
tom of a page. 

§556 

That the woman writer on an evening newspaper 
who gives advice to the lovelorn is invariably a 
man with a flowing beard. 

§557 

That all moving picture scenarios fetch fabur 
lous prices. 

1204] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
I ^ §558 

That tailors do not mind how long you keep 
them waiting for their money. 

§559 

That, if a woman constantly bleaches her hair, 
; she is in danger of going insane. 

§560 

j That garrulous people never have anything worth 
' saying. 

§561 

That most people would steal a million dollars 
if they were sure they'd never be caught. 



§562 



\ 
I 
( 
I That Maude Adams and David Warfield almost 

! go mad because they are forced to play one part so 

! long. 

§563 

That only millionaires go to Newport. 
[205] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§564 

That no one ever gets a full night's sleep in a 
sleeping-car. 

§565 

That lots of fashionable people eat at Childs* 
restaurants simply because they like good griddle 
cakes and coffee. 

§566 

That it is possible to overcome seasickness by 
sucking the juice of a lemon. 

§567 

That all men who wear beards do so in order 
to conceal weak chins. 

§568 

That the futurist painters are all insane. 

§569 

That, if you lend money, you lose the friend- 
ship of the recipient of your kindness. 
[206] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§570 

I That any play by a Russian author is sordid and 
certain to give one the blues. 

§571 

That newspaper reporters can write without difE- 
' culty, no matter how much noise and confusion is 
around them. 

§572 

i That the beer you brew at home is just as good 
I as that made in Munich. 



§573 

That as soon as the American Army landed in 
France half of the men in each French company 
were allowed to go home to help their wives swindle 
the Americans. 

§574 

That a man who has five children stands more 
chance of being elected President than a man who 
has none. 

[207] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§575 

That all artists are impractical. 

§576 

That opportunity comes at least once to every- 
man. 

§577 

That people who live in New York never have a 
moment to themselves. 

§578 

That the reason bachelors hate to visit happily 
married couples is that it makes them miserable 
with envy. 

§579 

That widows are far more dangerous than de- 
butantes. 

§580 

That women who worry about losing their beauty 
age much faster than those who don't. 
[208] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§581 

That whenever a group of men get together they 
immediately begin discussing booze and women. 

§582 

That if a woman gives a man a letter to mail, it 
will remain in his pocket for a week. 

§583 

That all long-haired men are effeminate, and all 
short-haired women are masculine. 

§584 

I 

That prohibition, whatever its faults, is a good 
thing for the workingman. 

§585 

That being in love with a beautiful woman is a 
great inspiration to an artist. 

§586 

That it is always necessary to tie ribbons on the 
[209] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

wrists of twins to keep Beulah from being confused 
with Otto. 

§587 

That there is something the matter with a man 
who can tell a Louis XV clock from a salt cellar 
by Benvenuto Cellini. 

§588 

That Abraham Lincoln was the originator of the 
smoking car story. 

§589 

That all young widows prolong the period of 
mourning if they think black becoming. 

§590 
That all negroes have perfect white teeth. 

§591 

That the editorial staff of The Liberator is com- 
posed entirely of anarchists, who are very violent 
characters. 

[210] 



■ 

t 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§592 

That if a sailor dies on board a ship, a shark 
becomes promptly cognizant of the fact and pro- 
ceeds to follow the ship all the way across the 
ocean. 

§593 

That the Boston Transcript is written entirely by 
college professors, and that its English is so good 
that common people can't understand it. 

§594 

That no woman can throw straight, and that if 
she aims a brick at the mantelpiece it will hit the 
bookcase behind her. 

§595 

That all of Woodrow Wilson's shortcomings 
were due to his having been a college professor. 

§596 

That dramatic critics get many invitations from 
beautiful actresses to dine with them alone in their 
[211] 



THE AMERICAN CR EDO 

boudoirs, and that the beautiful actresses there 
make love to them in order to get good notices. 

§597 

That a sharp man may for ten cents often pick 
up in a second-hand book-store a book that is 
worth a hundred dollars. 

§598 

That while the days in California are very warm, 
the evenings are always so cool that one has to 
wear an overcoat. 

§599 

That Ruth Law was in reality a German boy 
shrewdly disguised. 

§600 

That the mutual confidences of boarding-school 
girls are very racy. 

§601 

That the late Grover Cleveland was a great booze- 
[212] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

i fighter, and used to carry on like a drunken sailor 
at the White House. 

§602 

That if one sleeps with the moonlight shining 
[ full in one's face, one will go insane. 

§603 

That if one's nose itches, it is a sign that some- 
one is coming to visit. 

§604 

That both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis 
I were the illegitimate sons of Henry Clay. 

I § 605 



That a negro who wears gold-rimmed spectacles 
never actually needs them, but affects them because 
they make him look intelligent. 

§606 

That the liquid contained in the centre of many 
golf balls will cause instant total blindness. 
[213] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§607 

That when one asks a bell-boy in a hotel in 
Buda-Pest to get one's suit pressed, he reappears 
in a few minutes with a large blonde. 

§608 

That the description of the Battle of the Mame 
in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is a 
wonderful piece of writing. 

§609 

That all the officers of the United States Navy, 
before the day of Josephus Daniels, were terrific 
boozers, and that it was a common thing for them 
to run a battleship ashore, at a cost to the taxpayers 
of $9,000,000. 

§610 

That if one spills salt, one should throw a pinch 
over one's left shoulder to ward off ill luck. 

§611 

That when some one walks between a couple, 
[214] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

each of them should say "bread and butter" to 
ward off a quarrel. 

§612 

That when one sees a red-headed woman, one is 
sure to see a white horse within a block. 

§613 

That it is bad luck to see the new moon over 
one's left shoulder. 

, §614 

I 

f That carrying a nutmeg in one's pocket will pre- 

1 vent rheumatism. 

§ 615 

That a piece of bread and butter, if dropped, 
will always fall butter side down. 

§616 

That before the war whenever the American am- 
bassador in Berlin attended a diplomatic function 
he would be insulted by German high officials who 
would crack jokes about the United States. 
[215] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§617 

That rapping on wood will ward ofif calamity. 

§618 

That if one's corns hurt, it is a sign that it is 
going to rain. 

§619 

That if one dreams of falling and dreams that 
one lands, one will never awaken and will be dead. 

§620 

That if one saves the pennies, the dollars will 
save themselves. 

§621 

That to have a black cat cross one's path means 
bad luck. 

§622 

Tliat when a man consults his watch he always 
forgets what time it is the instant after he has re- 
placed it in his pocket. 

[216] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§623 

That cockroaches born in the morning are great- 
grandfathers before evening. 

§624 
That thunder sours fresh milk. 

§625 

That when one of the ultra-fashionable set gives 
j a house-party the guests do nothing but lounge 
I around, drink cocktails, and engage in a great 
t deal of very witty repartee. 

! §626 

I 

] That there are a vast number of desperate under- 

^ world characters who will engage to murder any- 

( body for a sum not exceeding one dollar and fifty 

I cents. 

i 

i §627 

j That French ladies' maids during their idle mo- 
I ments amuse themselves by peeping through the 
key-holes of bedroom doors. 
[217] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§628 

That women search their husbands' pants pock- 
ets at night and appropriate all the loose change. 

§629 

That to drop a dish-rag signifies that company is 
coming. 

§630 

That one can greatly increase one's chest expan- 
sion by standing in front of an open window every 
morning and taking twenty-five deep breaths. 

§631 

That at every fashionable wedding there are 
present no less than a dozen detectives who are 
engaged to watch the valuable gifts, and that no- 
body can ever distinguish the detectives from the 
guests. 

§632 

That people who live far away from New York 
know far more about the town than the natives do. 
[218] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§633 

That if one is having bad luck in a card game a 
great change of fortune is effected by walking 
around one's chair. 

§634 

That all policemen have unduly large feet. 

§635 

That people suffering from tuberculosis are al- 
ways very optimistic and feel sure that there is 
nothing the matter with them. 

§636 

I That old ladies enjoy attending a funeral and 
I that they always obtain front-row seats. 

I § 637 

I That when a man on the streets gazes at a woman 
I wearing abbreviated skirts his evil nature is awak- 
ened, but that if he were to see the same woman in 
I a bathing suit the sight of her would leave him 
j cold. 

£219] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§638 

That when one swallows a needle it travels 
through the body for years and years and ulti- 
mately emerges somewhere in the region of the 
little toe. 

§639 

That if a young swain can watch his girl eat 
com on the cob and still have any love for her, his 
affection is genuine. 

§640 

That the cooks who prepare griddle cakes in the 
front windows of Childs' restaurants are all expert 
jugglers. 

§641 

That a man who lives to be a hundred years old 
always takes a glass of whiskey a day and uses 
tobacco freely. 

§642 

That if a demi-rep really falls in love with a 
man she is always faithful to him to the bitter end. 
[220] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§643 

That if China could organize an army in pro- 
portion to its population it could conquer the 
world in about three weeks. 



§644 

That when an old maid retires at night she 
always looks under the bed for a burglar, and that 
if she were to discover one she would immediately 
lock the door and throw the key out of the window. 

§645 

That when a Frenchman gets in a free-for-all 
I fight he always strikes out with his feet instead of 
his fists. 



§646 

That it is extremely hazardous to drink well- 
water in the dark since one is likely to swallow a 
pollywog. 

§647 

That the director of an orchestra makes a great 
[221] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

many gestures merely to show off and that the 
music would be almost as good if there were no 
leader at all. 

§648 

That when a small boy is having his photograph' 
taken he will remain very quiet if one tells him 
that a little bird is about to emerge from the 
camera. 

§649 

That people of Oriental blood always have very 
wily natures and that they glide about without 
making a sound. 

§650 

That when a military spy is caught he always 
has in his possession a small but extremely valu- 
able piece of paper which he immediately proceeds 
to chew up and swallow. 

§651 

That middle-aged widows are very fond of 
college boys. 

[222] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§652 

That the headwaiter in every fashionable restau- 
rant owns a block of apartments and a Rolls- 
Royce. 

§653 

That the first thing the Bolsheviks did in Russia 
was to nationalize the women, and that all of the 
most toothsome cuties were reserved for Trotsky 
and Lenin. 

§654 

That no matter how angry a woman may be at 
I her husband he can always appease her wrath by 
giving her enough money to buy a new hat. 

§655 

That during the late war a great many society 
girls who acted as nurses cut up high jinks with 
the young soldiers. 

§656 

That when people who are unaccustomed to 
[223] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

money inherit a fortune their existence is likely 
to become very miserable. 

§657 

That before long all the money in the country 
will be in the hands of the Jews. 

§658 

That if the man in the end seat of a trolley car 
yawns, every one else in the car will soon also be 
yawning. 

§659 

That a person's sensations while drowning are 
rather agreeable and that on the whole it is a very 
pleasant death. 

§660 

That cows have very sad eyes. 

§661 

That raspberries taste better when eaten off the 
bush. 

[224] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§662 

That acrobats could not do their stunts if they 
had not had their bones scientifically broken a 
few moments after they were bom. 

§663 

That when two women enter a street car they 
always have a loud argument as to which one will 
stand the fare, but that as a matter of fact they 
are both bluffing and neither one wants to pay. 

§664 

That Chinese labourers work sixteen hours a 
day and are paid a weekly stipend of approxi- 
mately eleven cents. 



§665 

That football is a very fine thing and greatly 
improves the moral character of college boys and 
that they never neglect an opportunity in the heat 
of a game to surreptitiously kick an opponent in 
the back of the head. 

[225] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§666 

That die men who pass the collection plates in 
Fifth Avenue churches always have a lot of loosed 
change in their pockets on Monday morning. 

§667 

That the nurses in maternity hospitals are often 
careless and that the babies frequently get mixed 
up. 

§668 

That a youth who goes to Harvard, though he 
may learn nothing, is given a high polish. 

§669 

That many women who live in fashionable 
apartment houses have liaisons with the elevator 
boys. 

§670 

That the liquor problem is entirely due to corner 
saloons and that if there had never been such 
places nobody would have ever got drunk. 
[226] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§671 

That most women begin a street flirtation by 
;, dropping their handerchiefs. 

§672 

That a German never spends less than one hour 
I consuming a single glass of beer. 

[' • § 673 

I That women of ^e half world always carry all 
I their money in their stockings. 

I §674 

I That American men have more respect for 
I women than the men of any other country. 

§675 
That a flea is a very intelligent insect. 

§676 

That all the chorus girls in the Hippodrome are 
over forty years of age and have false teeth. 
[227] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§ 677 
That in a photoplay a motion picture actress 
brings tears to her eyes by concealing an onion in 
her handkerchief. 

§678 

That it is very dangerous to sleep in a folding 
bed since it is liable to close up in the middle of 
the night and smother one to death. 

§679 

That the Indians in wild west shows are in 
reality not Indians at all but painted Chinamen. 

§680 

That a man who is sitting in front of one will 
turn around if one concentrates one's attention on 
the back of his head. 

§681 

That a dexterous pickpocket can actually extract 
a roll of bills from the inside of one's undershirt 
without one being tlie wiser. 
[228] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§682 

That a young man who holds a position of 
trust in the financial world is constantly shadowed 
by detectives and that if he were to dine with a 
chorus girl he would immediately lose his job. 

§683 

That women who loll about the beaches in stun- 
ning bathing costumes never go near the water. 

§684 

That whenever a bank fails the president is al- 
ways a venerable grey-haired man who either 
commits suicide or goes to jail. 

§685 

That French actresses never hesitate to appear 
on the stage perfectly nude. 

§686 

That people who sit in the gallery at a play are 
more discriminating than those in the orchestra. 
[229] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§687 

That when a man falls from a great height he 
always loses consciousness before he hits the 
ground. 

§688 

That most men, when dressed in evening clothes, 
can hardly be distinguished from waiters. 

§689 

That convicts like their existence in the new 
reformed prisons so much that they often refuse 
to leave when their terms have expired. 

§690 

That a Mason who reveals the secrets of the 
order will mysteriously disappear and never be 
heard of again. 

§ 691 

That Daniel Webster delivered his greatest ora- 
tions when he was so drunk that he had to hold on 
to a table to stand up. 

[230] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§692 

That when Italians make wine they always press 
the grapes with their bare feet. 

§693 

That all star intercollegiate sprinters die of 
enlargement of the heart. 

§694 

That the most beneficial sleep is that which 
comes before midnight. 

§695 

That people with red hair are more directly de- 
scended from monkeys than the rest of mankind. 

§696 

That professors are absent-minded, that they 
often come to their classes minus collar or tie, and 
that they sometimes walk into other people's 
homes by mistake while engrossed in deep 
thought. 

[231] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§697 

That a pitcher on a baseball team is not ex- 
pected to hit. 

§698 

That when they drop anything on the floor in a 
canning factory they put it into the can without 
washing it, no matter how dirty the floor is. 

§699 

That a Chinaman may kill his wife for less than 
nothing, and need never even go into court to 
explain his conduct. 

§700 

That a negro will not work so long as he has a 
nickel in his pocket. 

§701 

That when a man tells you that he was horn in 
Virginia it is a sign that he will try to sell you a 
gold brick or some oil stock. 
[232] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§702 

That all Irishmen are very witty, and when en- 
gaged in an argument invariably crush their oppo- 
nents with a final excruciatingly funny remark. 

§703 

That all professors at German universities 
spend their evenings in beer-gardens, and that each 
one slowly sips from twenty-five to forty steins of 
I lager before retiring. 

§704 

That all French poets stay hooched up on ab- 
sinthe and produce their most sublime works when 
in a semi-demented condition. 

§705 

That the capacity of any negro boy for water- 
melon is unlimited. 

§706 
That laundry wagon drivers are mostly college 
graduates. 

[233] 



THE 


AMERICAN 


CREDO 






§707 




1 


That if an Irishman were shipwrecked on a caa 
nibal island he would be married to the chiefs 
daughter and running the joint inside of a week. 




§708 




1 



That all Methodist deacons, when they visit a 
city, get hilariously drunk and spend their time at 
leg shows and disreputable resorts. 



§709 



i 



That people who are bom rich are never vain,- 
and that people who are bom poor and later be- 
come rich are always vain. 

§710 

That when a hard boiled guy gets married he 
usually becomes so respectable that it hurts. 

§711 

That Edgar Allan Poe wrote all his stuff while 
sobering up after sprees. 

[234] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§712 

That England always persuades some other 
country to do her fighting for her, and that, when 
both her ally and her enemy are exhausted, she 
comes in strong at the finish and reaps all the 
benefits from the war. 

§713 

That when an Indian falls in love with a white 
woman and she refuses to marry him he never 
loses his self-possession, but goes back to his own 
people and lies around in the sun wrapped in a 
blanket. 

§714 

That summer romances are forgotten with the 
first frost. 

§715 

That in the days of chivalry all the Knights 
Errant were gallant to all the women they met, 
said their prayers every night before retiring, 
drank a little, but did not swear. 
[235] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§716 



That if you are familiar with a negro once, he 
will shove you off the sidewalk into the gutter the 
next time he meets you. 

§717 ! 

That only a small percentage of Americans 
know more than a few lines of "The Star-Spangled 
Banner," and that they are so unfamiliar witli the 
tune that they are always getting to their feet 
when the band plays "How Dry I am." 

§ 718 

That the French and English were eager to give 
up and make peace on the Kaiser's terms when the 
United States horned in and forced them to go on. 

§719 

That if one tries on a suit of clothes in a Jewish 
clothing store one is always told that it is a per- 
fect fit, no matter if it hangs like a coat upon a 
rack or clings like the paper to the wall. 
[236] 



Hi 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§720 

. That old negro mammies, now fast becoming 
{ extinct, always refer to their "white folks" as 
"honey chile." 

§721 



That a piece of asafoetida worn about the neck 
will ward off various diseases. 

§722 

That bom and bred Virginians and South Caro- 
linians are very proud of their origin and are given 
to excessive braggadocio. 

§723 

That in spite of the fact that all negroes make a 
great holiday of July the Fourth only about five 
per cent, of them know why they are celebrating. 

§724 

That when you've made up your mind to have a 
tooth extracted it always stops aching just as you 
place your hand on the dentist's doorknob. 
[237] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§725 

That persons with exceedingly high foreheads 
are always possessed of remarkable intelligence. 

§726 

That it is almost impossible to find a person 
living in New York who was bom there. 

§727 

That drinking vinega-r or the juice of a lemon 
will reduce one's weight. 

§728 

That all negroes love funerals and circuses, and 
turn out in great numbers to attend them both, ar- 
rayed in their best clothes. 

§729 

That a fortune-teller invariably says that you 
are going on a long journey, will cross water, 
and had better bjware of a certain dark person 
who is trying to make trouble. 
[238] 



j 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§730 

That nowhere is such hospitality found as south 
of the Mason and Dixon line. 



§731 

That the quivering cry of a screech owl heard 
just outside a house is a sign that some one in the 
house will shortly die. 

§732 

That seaside building lots are under the water 
a greater part of the time. 

§733 

That it is impossible to learn a foreign language 
at college. 

§734 

That when people read a patent medicine pam- 
phlet they immediately become convinced that 
they are suffering from all the diseases described 
therein. 

£239] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§735 

That a husband is tickled to death when his 
wife goes away to the country. 

§736 

That a negro eats nothing but pork chops and 
chicken, and that he always has a razor handy. 

§737 

That popular song writers always steal their 
melodies from well known operas. 

§738 

That a clever Central Office detective knows the 
face of every crook in town. 

§739 
That only a millionaire can afford to play polo. 

§740 

That when one is taking a bath it is very dif- 
ficult to keep the soap under control. 
[240] 



I THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§741 

' That a Jew always outwits a Christian in a busi- 
ness deal. 

§ 742 

; That one always gets tired of a blonde quicker 
than a brunette. 

§743 

That the chief purpose of music in hotel dining- 
rooms is to drown the noise of people eating soup. 

§744 

That people go abroad and visit historic places 
for the sole purpose of being able to brag about 
it. 

§745 

That a married man never enjoys kissing his 
wife. 

§746 

That a man's wife is never as good a cook as 
his mother. 

£241] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§747 

That the women of backwoods communities have 
learned how to dress as a resuh of watching motion 
pictures. 

§743 

That when a girl who has been raised in poor 
circumstances marries, she demands a lot of expen- 
sive jewelry, four automobiles, three country 
houses, and a large staff of servants; but that 
when a girl who is accustomed to every luxury 
marries, she is perfectly willing to sew, cook, wash, 
take care of the baby, and dam her husband's 
socks. 

§749 

That people with a strong physique are more 
likely to succumb to an illness than those who look 
delicate. 

§750 

That as a result of prohibition all wealthy 
Americans who like to tipple will go abroad and 
spend the rest of their lives there. 
[242] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§751 

That all of the Americans taken prisoner by the 
Bolsheviki were innocent. 

§752 

That in Japan all the positions of trust in the 
banks are held by Chinamen. 

§753 

That in English families of title, the younger 
sons always cut up high jinks, and have to be sent 
out of the country because of gambling debts or 
escapades with women. 

§754 

That you can judge a man by what newspaper 
he reads. 

§755 

That a few minutes before an atheist dies he 
usually changes his mind and becomes deeply re- 
ligious, and that if he fails to do so he dies in 
great agony. 

[243] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§756 

That at every girls' boarding school there are 
several female rakes who do nothing but smoke 
cigarettes, tell risque stories, and put the other 
girls hep to a lot of things they should not know. 

§757 

That some day Canada will become a part of 
the United States. 

§758 

That artists' models, while posing, frequently 
faint from exhaustion. 

§759 

That, in the old days, whenever a millionaire 
gave a midnight supper party a semi-clad chorus 
girl would dance on the table, and the guests would 
drink champagne out of her slipper. 

§760 

That people in the theatrical profession never 
take marriage seriously. 

[244] 



=1 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§761 

That indigent men always pawn their winter 
[ overcoats when the warm weather begins. 

§762 

That the crowned heads of Continental Europe 
, have vast quantities of illegitimate children. 

§763 

That when a man is suffering from misfortune 
he is always greatly cheered up by meeting a 
friend who is also in woe. 

§764 

That up until twenty years ago all physicians 
affected beards, but that they no longer do so 
because it is considered unsanitary. 

§765 

That at the time of the American Revolution 
everybody in England was in favour of giving the 
colonies their liberty and that the war only took 
£245] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

place because of the obstinacy' of the king, who 
was ven- pro-German. 



'66 



That finger bowls are really of no value and 
are merely used as a matter of form. 



767 



That when a bride and groom arrive at an hotel 
resort they never are able to disguise the fact that 
they have just been married. 

v^ 768 

That if an undertaker were to discover tliat a 
supposedly dead person was still alive, he would 
immediately inject poison into the body in order 
not to lose the job. 

§ 769 

That a man who loudly declares that he intends 
always to remain a bachelor always marries the 
first pretty girl he meet*. 

[246] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

vN 770 

Tliat there is no future for a man who works in 
a bank. 

§771 

Tliat when a subway conductor calls out the 
names of the stations nobody can understand him. 

§772 

That no matter how courageous a man may be 
he is always afraid to yisit a dentist. 

§773 

Tliat parents suflfer great mental anguish when 

they whip their children. 

§774 

That people who offer one a finn handclasp are 
yer}' upright and honest. 

§775 

That a high-minded man and woman neyer kiss 
each other mitil the man proposes marriage. 
[247] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§776 

That a man who follows horse-racing goes broke 
sooner or later. 

§777 

That a minister's son usually grows up to be 
a drunkard or a thief. 

§778 

That most people who owti automobiles cannot 
afford them. 

§779 

That when a man of little breeding attends a • 
banquet he never knows what spoon or fork to use. . 

§780 

That no matter how happy a bride may be she 
always weeps on her wedding day. 

§781 

That in London all clerks go to work at ten 
A. M., quit at 3 P. M., and wear silk hats. 
[248] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§782 

That when one drops a penny in a chewing 
gum slot machine, the chances are that nothing will 
come out. 

§783 

That the chief pastime of young medical stu- 
dents is hurling human arms and legs at each 
other in the dissecting room. 

§784 

That you can get the best seat in the Grand 
Opera House at Milan for twenty cents. 

§785 

That if Theodore Roosevelt had been president 
when the War began he would have ended it within 
three weeks. 

§786 

That a man who falls in love with a married 
woman is rotten to the core and is capable of any 
crime from murder to petty larceny. 
[249] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



§787 
That a beautiful woman never has any brains. 

§788 

That if a waiter in a restaurant has a grudge 
against one he will surreptitiously spit into one's 
food. 

§789 
That the Haitians still practise cannibalism. 

§790 

That young girls only smoke cigarettes because 
they think it looks smart. 

§791 

That the only people who really appreciate 
opera are Italian barbers. 

§792 

That if one is in a great hurry to get some place, 
one is always greatly delayed en route. 
[250] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§793 

That a great many society women use very pro- 
fane language. 

§794 

That a tremendous amount of sickness is caused 
by drinking ice water. 

§795 

That a person who has little to say is very wise 
and a profound thinker. 

§796 

That people who live in Brooklyn have a great 
many babies. 

§797 

That to pay a bill in cash causes one a great 
deal more anguish than to pay it with a cheque. 

§798 

That people who purloin spoons from hotel din- 
[251] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

ing-rooms and keep them as souvenirs are honest in 
every other way. 

§799 

That when two young girls who room together 
return from a party they always lie awake all 
night and talk about it. 

§ 800 

That when a woman has a row with her hus- 
band she always cries and threatens to return to 
her mother. 

§801 

That at a wedding nobody ever pays any atten- 
tion to the bridegroom. 

§802 
That every small village has a haunted house. 

§803 

That a human being's heart stops beating one 
instant in the middle of the night. 
[252] 



II 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§804 

That up to fifteen years' ago people always went 
to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. 

§805 

That professional card sharps always dress im- 
maculately and have very ingratiating manners. 

§806 

That in a crowded car a man never offers his 
seat to a woman unless she is very beautiful. 

§807 

That a young man must engage in a certain 
amount of deviltry before he settles down. 

§808 

That people who go to church a great deal are 
either fanatics or hypocrites. 

§809 

That a bride always looks very pretty. 
[253] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 



§810 

That people who receive complimentary seats 
for the theatre always roast the play. 

§811 

That battleships are of no further fighting value, 
and that they are only constructed for the conven- 
ience of admirals who use them as they would 
private yachts. 

§812 

That the Germans never invent anything them- 
selves, but tliat tliey appropriate the most ingen- 
ious inventions of otlier people. 

§813 

That it is easier to teach a mongrel dog tricks 
than a thoroughbred. 

§ 814 

That whetlier a New Englander is in Siberia, 
Hindustan, Alaska or Flatbush, he always returns 



home for Thanksgiving. 



[254] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§815 

That an after-dinner speech is always very tire- 
some. 

§816 

That most women's diseases are the result of 
modem fashions in dress. 

§817 

That everybody who signed the Declaration of 
Independence was a great man. 

§818 

That the late war was decided upon years ago 
by Bismarck, who, in formulating his plans, freely 
consulted Nietzsche. 

§819 

That when Lee surrendered to Grant there was 
a very touching scene; that Lee offered Grant his 
sword, which Grant declined and that Grant then 
offered Lee a cigar and a swig out of a pint of 
whiskey, which Lee accepted. 
[255] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§820 

That hasty marriages are bound to end disas- 
trously. 

§821 

That the men who own the hat-cheoking privi- 
leges in New York restaurants are all millionaires. 

§822 

That there is a strange and mysterious difiference 
between people who live in Manhattan and people 
who live in Brooklyn. 

§823 

That it makes no difiference when one drops to- 
bacco ashes on the carpet, because the ashes help 
to preserve it. 

§824 

That when one of the houris in a Turkish se- 
raglio misbehaves, she is immediately sewn up in 
a sack and dropped through a trap-door into a 
subterranean river. 

[256] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§ 825 

That if one goes out wearing new clothes it is 
sure to rain. 

§826 

That a tremendous amount of kidney trouble is 
due to motorcycles and jitney automobiles. 

§ 827 

That when a woman driving an automobile gets 
into a tight place she promptly loses her head and 
causes an accident. 

§828 

That if one were to read the dictionary ten min- 
utes each day one would become very learned. 

§829 

That the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday has made 
SljOOOjOOO out of his gospel business. 

§830 

That when a Spaniard is in love he hangs 
[257] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

around all night beneath the window of his inamo- 
rata and serenades her with a guitar. 

§831 

That London women have beautiful complex- 
ions, which they owe entirely to the fogs. 

§832 

That young people become especially amorous 
in the springtime. 

§ 833 ■ 

That Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity 
because, as a boy, an apple fell off a tree and 
fetched him a bang on the coco. 

§834 

That Edgar Allan Poe was always drunk except 
when he took morphine. 

§835 

That in every family the father is partial to 
the girl and the mother to the son. 
[258] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§836 

That if a man tries to flirt with a woman at a 
little distance and she looks with curiosity at his 
feet, he will be so overcome by embarrassment 
that he will retreat. 

§837 

That the current craze for spiritualism is the 
result of propaganda financed by the men who 
manufacture ouija boards. 

§838 

That the monocle worn by an Englishman is 
made of cheap window glass, and that whenever 
he wants to see anything he has to drop it out of 
his eye. 

§839 

That the late J. Pierpont Morgan was the easiest 
mark the fake antique dealers of Europe had 
discovered in 250 years, and that a syndicate of 
Italians actually built five factories in Italy for 
the sole purpose of manufacturing fake Rem- 
brandts to sell to him. 

[259] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§840 

That when peroxide of hydrogen is applied to 
an open wound, the ensuing bubbling shows that 
the wound is being efficaciously disinfected. 



§841 



< 



That since the war all the French atheists have 
become devout Catholics. 

§842 

That England entered the war in order to dis- 
charge an obligation of honour to Belgium. 

§843 
That Southerners are chivalrous. 

§844 

That all college girls wear glasses and are very 
ugly. 

§845 

That all men who want to work very little and 
get a lot of money for it are Bolsheviki. 
[260] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

§846 

That the life of a young man who marries an 
old woman for her money is always a very miser- 
able and unhappy one. 

§847 

That prize-fighters are very good to their moth- 
ers, and that they are drunk all the time they are 
not training for a match. 

§848 

That in all the battles of the late war, both on 
the eastern front and on the western front, the 
German hordes enormously outnumbered the small 
and gallant bands of Russians, Frenchmen, Ita- 
lians, Rumanians, Portuguese, Sikhs, Cambodians, 
Irislhmen, Scotchmen, Welchmen, Canadians, 
Australians, New Zealanders, Somalis, Greeks, 
Singalese and Americans who opposed them. 

§849 

That water drunk from the washstand faucet is 
not as pure as water drunk from the kitchen faucet. 
[261] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§850 

That if a child eats snow he will get diphtheria. 

§851 

That all professional strong men are muscle- 
bound. 

§852 

That men who are good to animals are often 
wife-beaters. 

§853 

That a baby knows instinctively whether a man 
is good or bad. 

§854 

That there are a lot of things which are very 
good in theory but wont work in practice. 

§855 

That if all the money in the world were to be 'I 
divided, within a year the same men would have 
it again. 

[262] 



i 



.11 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§856 

That although 200 per cent, of Washington's 
army deserted at one time or another, the patriot- 
ism and valour of the Continentals should set us 
a great example. 

§857 

That the late Theodore Roosevelt got a dollar a 
word for all his magazine writings. 

§858 

That the French make great soldiers; that the 
English Tommy is a great soldier; that the Cana- 
dians make great soldiers; that the Australians, 
Germans, Belgians and Americans make great 
soldiers; that the Cossacks are great soldiers; that 
the Japs make great little soldiers, etc., etc. 

§859 

That the French, Dutch, Belgians, Jews, Scotch 

and Germans are very thrifty peoples; that the 

Italians save every cent they make; that the New 

England Yankee is very economical; that the Chi- 

[263] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

nese and Japanese live on rice and are extraordi- 
narily thrifty; that, in fact, no one is improvident 
and extravagant except Americans in New York 
and Paris, and all Irishmen. 

§860 

That if all the coal in the world should suddenly 
give out, science would quickly devise something 
in its stead. 

§861 

That it always takes a woman at least an hour 
and a half to dress, whereas a man finishes the 
job in three minutes. 

§862 

That Henry Ford is against the Jews because he 
tried to borrow $50,000,000 from them and they 
demanded 10 per cent, a month. 

§863 . 

That all the girls in Richmond, Va., are great 
beauties, but that they will not look at a Yankee. 
[264] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 
§864 

That Baltimore is the place to eat oysters, and 
that the folks down there are all epicures and live 
on the fat of the land. 

§865 

That the Pennsylvania Dutch are all very rich, 
but that they can't speak English and never take a 
bath. 

§866 

That the late war was caused by the Kaiser 
single-handed, and that his plan was to seize all of 
Europe, reduce the inhabitants to slavery, and 
then conquer the United States. 

§867 

That every doUar-a-year man during the 
war swindled the government out of at least 
$1,000,000. 

§868 

That President Harding was nominated at 
[265] 



THE AMERICAN CREDO 

Chicago as a result of a clever trick arranged by 
Col. George W. Harvey, and that Harvey was 
made Ambassador to England as a reward. 

§869 

That a war with England would probably be a 
good thing, inasmuch as the English would be 
afraid to cross the ocean, and so the United States 
would have a chance to grab both Canada and 
Mexico. 



{The End) 



[266] 



31^77-1 



II 



